Overcoming Cynicism: Lessons From a Drunk Raccoon

Is this raccoon drunk? Probably not, but you may have seen the recent news story of the drunk raccoon. The photo accompanying that story shows the raccoon passed out next to a toilet in the bathroom of a liquor store. With the ascendence of AI, how many of you were skeptical of the story at first? The (warranted) attention to the flood of misinformation has made many of us cynical, and we now often discount even true news.

Source: Alexas Fotos / Pexels

In late 2025, a photo of a drunk raccoon charmed the internet. Passed out next to a toilet in the bathroom of a liquor store, the creature was sleeping off the, ahem, cocktail he drank. He broke into bottles containing vodka, rum, moonshine, eggnog, and even some peanut butter whiskey. Were you skeptical when you first saw this story? It turned out to be true, but this is just the kind of artificial intelligence (AI)-fueled hoax that we encounter every day.

Have you found yourself becoming more and more cynical when confronted with information? The drunk raccoon story doesn’t really matter to our lives, but there are so many news topics that do—vaccine efficacy, election integrity, climate change.

The Backlash Effect: When Skepticism Goes Too Far

With an overwhelming flood of information, it can be hard to separate fact from fiction, opening the door for dangerous mis- and disinformation. As we wrote about a few years ago, a number of interventions have been introduced aimed at “inoculating us” against false news, including two online games, Bad News and Go Viral!. Both are designed to prompt us to think critically by exposing us to misinformation techniques. Early research suggested that such games showed some effectiveness (e.g., Maertens et al., 2021).

Despite their early promise, newer research reveals that games aimed at inoculating us to false news may backfire, making people cynical about all information—not just the false stuff. Researchers examined research on inoculation games and found that people did indeed become better at identifying false information but also started incorrectly identifying true information as false (Modirrousta-Galian & Higham, 2023). The authors wrote that “participants become skeptical of all news and are less willing to assign high reliability ratings” to any news story.

A more recent study also showed rising rates of skepticism. A meta-analysis of 67 studies (including nearly 200,000 participants across 40 countries) found that people can generally differentiate true news from false news but are better at spotting falsehoods than recognizing truth (Pfänder & Altay, 2025). That is, they tend to question false information and true information. And when they make errors in judgment, they err on the side of skepticism—they are more likely to mistakenly disbelieve true news than to believe false news.

Although it’s promising that people can learn to become more skeptical of false information, it’s alarming that they simultaneously seem to become more skeptical of true information. Such general increases in skepticism and cynicism may erode trust in legitimate institutions, science, and journalism.

Regulations and Cybersecurity

In response to this research, Giulia Maria Galli (2025) of the European Commission wrote that digital literacy education isn't sufficient. Galli suggests we need structural changes, which include regulations and cybersecurity. Research makes clear that we can’t put the onus of solving such an entrenched problem on individuals. After all, most governments don’t expect you to be skeptical of, for example, foods you buy in the grocery store and test them yourself for contamination. That’s what regulations are for.

With respect to misinformation, Galli asserts that regulation and cybersecurity should work toward the following three goals:

• “The truth has to be more fluent”—that is, clear and easy to understand.
• “The politicisation of content must be prevented” so that people can focus on accuracy and not on whether they “are liked and accepted” by their political side.
• “Echo chambers must be avoided and platforms’ algorithms left unfed” to avoid the “funnel” toward politicized and extreme content.

Roles for Psychological Literacy and Emotional Literacy

Of course, we can’t give up on individual-based solutions either. After all, regulations will never work perfectly. To continue our food metaphor, we may trust regulations regarding food in our grocery stores, but we aren’t going to buy a clearly rotten tomato. Moreover, disinformation is not only online but also in face-to-face encounters. At the individual level, Galli argues that we need to emphasize psychological and emotional literacy as essential foundations for effective digital literacy programs.

• Galli defines psychological literacy as “the ability to apply psychological knowledge to solve real-world problems, understand behaviour and communicate effectively”—a means to recognize the psychological processes that make us vulnerable to manipulation.
• She defines emotional literacy as “recognising, labelling and managing the emotions that psychological processes trigger”—the emotions that make us vulnerable to manipulation.

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More specifically, psychological literacy enables us to recognize and understand the psychological mechanisms that make us vulnerable to manipulation, including confirmation bias, cognitive biases, the illusory truth effect, and the powerful influence of social recognition needs. By understanding these processes, we can better identify when our judgment is being compromised, including by our need for group acceptance. This awareness is particularly crucial for younger generations, who are especially susceptible to the desire for social validation in virtual contexts.

Emotional literacy complements psychological literacy by empowering us to recognize, label, and manage emotions triggered by information exposure. Galli argues that disinformation campaigns deliberately exploit emotional responses, and without the ability to analyze these reactions, people's critical thinking skills become compromised. When individuals can identify their emotional responses to content (whether outrage, fear, or excitement), they can pause before these feelings override their critical thinking abilities.

Together, psychological and emotional literacy address what the author identifies as the "heart of the problem": not merely the ability to identify false information but also the capacity to understand one's own cognitive and emotional responses to it, thereby countering both polarization and corrosive skepticism.

The Drunk Raccoon Strikes Again

Would you believe us if we told you that the drunk raccoon is a repeat offender? Or are you skeptical?

We recently wrote about the benefits of fact-checking. We noted that research suggests that people are generally supportive of fact-checking, though they seem to want others to do the work, rather than do it themselves. The researchers who conducted the meta-analysis we referenced above conclude that their findings about our inherent skepticism toward news “lend support to crowdsourced fact-checking initiatives and suggest that, to improve discernment, there is more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of fact-checked false news.” That is, individually or together (as in crowdsourcing), we can’t leave the fact-checking to corporations and professionals.

We won’t leave you hanging. We fact-checked the serial burglar raccoon, and it’s true. “‘Supposedly this is like the third break-in he's had,’ a local animal control officer said,” although not always to drink alcohol. He also broke into a karate studio and a Department of Motor Vehicles office, where he helped himself to some snacks.

Again, whether you believe or discount a story about a recidivist raccoon isn’t all that important. But there are too many news stories that really do matter to our lives, and it’s worth culling fact from fiction. But not through increased cynicism. The fight against misinformation isn't about teaching people to be more suspicious; it's about building regulatory and cybersecurity systems that make truth accessible and cultivating citizens who understand their own minds.