Given that human prejudice is persistent, has the harm of disinformation to democracy been overestimated? Associate Research Fellow Tzu-wei Hung at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica and Dr. Tzu-Chieh Hung at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) offer an answer. In this work, they define the problem by clarifying relevant concepts and present a case study of China’s attack on Taiwan. Based on predictive coding theory from the cognitive sciences, they next offer a framework to explain how China’s cognitive warfare works and to what extent it succeeds. They argue that this framework helps identify vulnerable targets and better explains some of the conflicting data in the literature. Finally, based on the framework, they predict China’s strategy and discuss Taiwan’s options in terms of cognitive and structural interventions. The work was published by Oxford University Press in the Journal of Global Security Studies in July 2022.

Article Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogac016