This article addresses educational challenges posed by the future of work, examining “21st century skills”, their conception, assessment, and valorization. It focuses in particular on key soft skill competencies known as the “4Cs”: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. In a section on each C, we provide an overview of assessment at the level of individual performance, before focusing on the less common assessment of systemic support for the development of the 4Cs that can be measured at the institutional level (i.e., in schools, universities, professional training programs, etc.). We then present the process of official assessment and certification known as “labelization”, suggesting it as a solution both for establishing a publicly trusted assessment of the 4Cs and for promoting their cultural valorization. Next, two variations of the “International Institute for Competency Development’s 21st Century Skills Framework” are presented. The first of these comprehensive systems allows for the assessment and labelization of the extent to which development of the 4Cs is supported by a formal educational program or institution. The second assesses informal educational or training experiences, such as playing a game. We discuss the overlap between the 4Cs and the challenges of teaching and institutionalizing them, both of which may be assisted by adopting a dynamic interactionist model of the 4Cs—playfully entitled “Crea-Critical-Collab-ication”—for pedagogical and policy-promotion purposes. We conclude by briefly discussing opportunities presented by future research and new technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the considerable challenge of sourcing expertise and determining which experts to trust. Dissonant information fostered controversy in public discourse and encouraged an appeal to a wide range of social indicators of trustworthiness in order to decide whom to trust. We analyze public discourse on expertise by examining how social indicators inform the reputation of Dr. Didier Raoult, the French microbiologist who rose to international prominence as an early advocate for using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. To comprehend how these indicators came to inform his reputation, we outline Dr. Raoult’s rise to fame based on discourse about hydroxychloroquine. We then discuss why we trust in experts like scientist-practitioners. This is followed by an examination of how social indicators of trust like status, epistemic authority, influence and values have informed Dr. Raoult’s reputation. We conclude with recommendations for how to improve the selection and evaluation of social indicators of trust and reputations. Our aim here, instead of making a claim about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine or Dr. Raoult’s reputation per se, is to outline through this case study how social indicators of trust inform reputation and the challenge they present to evaluating expertise.

In this article we examine the issue of AI assistants, and the way they respond to insults and sexually explicit requests. Public concern over these responses, particularly because AI assistants are usually female-voiced, prompted tech companies to make them more assertive. Researchers have explored whether these female-voiced AI assistants could encourage abusive behavior and reinforce societal sexism. However, the extent and nature of the problem are unclear due to a lack of data on user interactions. By combining psychological and socio-cultural perspectives, we problematize these assumptions and outline a number of research questions for leveraging AI assistants to promote gender inclusivity more effectively.

################### ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN SCIENTIFIC REPORTS: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09168-y ################### Scientific disinformation can impose enormous economic and public health burdens. Several types of interventions have been proposed to prevent the proliferation of false information online, where most of the spreading takes place. A recently proposed strategy to help online users recognise false content is to follow the techniques of professional fact checkers, such as looking for information on other websites (lateral reading) and looking beyond the first results suggested by search engines (click restraint). In two preregistered online experiments (N = 5387), we simulated a social-media environment and set-out two interventions, one in the form of a pop-up meant to induce participants to follow such techniques, the other based on monetary incentive. In Experiment 1, we compared these interventions to a control condition. In Experiment 2 another condition was added to test the joint impact of the pop-up and the monetary incentive. We measured participants' ability to identify whether presented scientific information was scientifically (in)valid. Results revealed that while monetary incentives were overall more effective in increasing accuracy, the pop-up contributed when the post originated from an unknown source (and participants could rely less on prior information). Additional analysis on participants’ search style based on both self-report responses and objectively measured behaviour revealed that the pop-up increased the use of fact-checking strategies, and that these in turn increased accuracy. Study 2 also clarified that the pop-up and the incentive did not interfere with each other, but rather acted complementarily, suggesting that attention and literacy interventions can be designed in synergy.

Epistemic curiosity (EC) is a cornerstone of human cognition that contributes to the actualization of our cognitive potential by stimulating a myriad of information-seeking behaviours. Yet, its fundamental relationship with uncertainty remains poorly understood, which limits our ability to predict within- and between-individual variability in the willingness to acquire knowledge. Here, a two-step stochastic trivia quiz designed to induce curiosity and manipulate answer uncertainty provided behavioural and neural evidence for an integrative model of EC inspired from predictive coding. More precisely, our behavioural data indicated an inverse relationship between average surprise and EC levels, which depended upon hemodynamic activity in the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex from one trial to another and from one individual to another. Complementary, the elicitation of epistemic surprise and the relief of acute curiosity states were respectively related to ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum activity. Taken together, our results account for the temporal evolution of EC over time, as well as for the interplay of EC, prior knowledge and surprise in controlling memory gain.