CNA continuously invests in innovative, independent research projects that explore new tools and approaches for addressing emerging national safety and security challenges. From analyzing machine learning for public safety to developing a Navy Force Design Lab, CNA's most creative thinkers are continuously working on new approaches to help government solve the nation’s toughest problems. In our Meet the Innovator series, we interview the analysts behind these projects about their work and their innovation process.
Q: You’re directing a CNA-funded project to test the potential for making the staff of a large organization more resilient in the face mis-, dis- and mal-information. What's innovative about this particular project?
McBride: The project is innovative in a couple of ways. From a content perspective, what we’ve heard consistently is that it’s going to take a combination of interventions to make people resilient to misinformation; there's no single silver bullet. That was the impetus for this project. The question we're asking now is: Is a combination of interventions—specifically media literacy and inoculation—more effective than a single intervention by itself?
So this project is innovative in that within the field, these interventions have previously been examined singly within different parts of academia. Media literacy has its original roots in departments of education. Inoculation efforts have their roots with social psychologists. Fact-checking has its roots in schools of journalism. But at CNA, we have an interdisciplinary team, and we're able to tackle this as a cross-disciplinary effort.
Another way in which it's innovative is that we designed the intervention with a real eye on an actual workforce. Often when academics and scholars are designing studies and surveys to see if something works, they're paying survey respondents to take the survey, and they're not necessarily concerned with “Can this be deployed within a workforce?” Their interest is more academic, right? We designed our interventions specifically to be something that could be deployed in a workforce. So we were really cognizant of the need to keep the time commitment relatively low. A workforce can't afford to send employees to a two-hour training on misinformation. And we were cognizant of the price point as well.
One of the other ways in which our study is innovative, from an execution standpoint, is that we have some really fantastic partners both at George Washington University and at MIT, with feedback as well from a professor at Princeton. We have connected with some of the country's leading thinkers on this topic. So what we've designed and are executing is an extraordinarily high-quality study—and with a three-year timeline. That means we can ask not just, “Does the combination of interventions increase your resilience immediately?” but also, “Does it still increase your resilience nine months later?” You don't see that frequently because it's difficult to do.
Q: How would you describe your personal approach to innovation?
McBride: My experience is that the most successful instances of innovation usually come out of an interdisciplinary group coming together. When I'm working on a project, I try to pull together a large group of people so that there are a lot of different ideas in the room. What's been really interesting about this particular project is that we have people from different disciplines and backgrounds, people with degrees in political science and in psychology, for example.
One example of when we needed an innovative solution was dealing with the problem that we can't pay the people who are going to receive the trainings, but we also can't mandate that they take the trainings, which a large employer could otherwise do. Because this isn't a training yet; it's still an experiment to see what works. So a group of five or six of us got together to come up with ways to incentivize people to participate without being able to pay them or mandate their participation.
We actually came up with multiple solutions by bringing all these folks together. One is a set of mathematical solutions, choices we can make when we do our data analysis that can control for attrition, so that our final analysis isn't catastrophically affected if 100 people agree to engage with our survey on day one but only 90 when we send out the second survey a month later.
Another solution was based on the literature about what motivates people to take surveys. We found that some people participate in surveys because they're altruistic. Some people do it because they're ego-tripping; they think their opinion is very important. Some people do it out of a sense of service or duty. And then we came up with ways to add language into our solicitation letter that would hit on all those motivations so that we're appealing to the people who are driven by altruism or by ego or by service.
Those two solutions come from wildly different fields, right? One is from statistics, and one is from psychology. We ended up with this constellation of different solutions that none of us could have come up with individually on our own. My take on this is that the most successful instances of innovation come from large groups coming together with different perspectives to work on a single problem.
Q: You’ve been at CNA for more than seven years, after working in both intelligence and academia. You’re immersed into the DNA of CNA by now, so how would you describe CNA's approach to innovation?
McBride: Let me start by noting that this particular project is the latest in a series of projects that actually began in 2021 with a CNA-funded project. It was a small project on the psychology of disinformation—before the topic had reached such a fevered pitch. We proposed that project because we thought it was interesting and forward-leaning, something that the government was going to have to eventually care about. I think we anticipated where the train was headed. Since then, we’ve expanded into $1.4 million worth of government-funded research on countering misinformation. This entire line of research was incubated via a CNA-funded project. So I think that's pretty epic.
But I've had a really fantastic experience with CNA-funded projects that didn’t work out, too. I've proposed novel ideas and had them funded, and in two cases we decided about a third of the way through that the projects weren’t working. We ran with it, and it didn't pan out, and we gave the money back so CNA could invest it in something else. But the message from CNA leadership was, “We tried something, and we learned something from that, even though it didn't yield the result we expected.” It speaks to CNA's commitment to innovation that there's no shame attached to trying a new thing and having that new thing not succeed, that there’s recognition of value in failed attempts.
That's the kind of innovation that’s harder to do with sponsor money. With internally funded projects, you can try a new thing, as long as you have good reason to believe that it will work. It’s OK if it doesn't work; learning comes from failure. And I think that opens the door to more creative attempts. It really gestures to people that it's OK to try novel approaches on novel issues. If researchers feel like they’re operating under a pressure to succeed, where they feel they have to guarantee success, they won't try things, because they'll be afraid of failing. I've never felt afraid of failing at CNA, because I've always felt like there was an understanding that sometimes it just won't work out, and that's OK.
