Centre for Democracy and Information Integrity (CDI)
The Centre for Democracy and Information Integrity (CDI) studies misinformation, political polarisation, institutional trust, and AI-driven influence on democratic societies.
BI Research Centre
As information becomes easier to manipulate and harder to verify, the need for systematic, research-driven responses grows—nationally and internationally. BI Norwegian Business School hosts leading experts on misinformation, political extremism, trust, collective threat, opinion formation, digital influence, and institutional legitimacy. Bringing these scholars into a single center opens up work that individual labs cannot achieve alone: larger-scale projects, integrated perspectives across fields, and research infrastructure that spans experiments, large datasets, and computational methods.
Mission
Democratic societies are under increasing pressure. Mis- and disinformation, political polarisation, declining institutional trust, extremist narratives, and the rapid spread of generative AI systems all create conditions where public debate becomes harder to navigate and easier to manipulate. These challenges are not theoretical—they shape elections, public policy, and citizens’ everyday decisions. Norway is not exempt.
The Centre for Democracy & Information Integrity (CDI) exists to meet this need. It brings together researchers from psychology, political science, communication, economics, data science, law, and organizational behavior with a shared focus on understanding and strengthening democratic resilience. By coordinating expertise across several BI departments, CDI creates the kind of interdisciplinary environment these problems require but rarely receive.
CDI’s work moves along three tracks:
- Understanding. Deepening empirical insight into how people process political information and form beliefs in complex media environments—why they accept or reject information, how polarization develops, and what increases susceptibility to misperceptions and extremist narratives.
- Consequences. Connecting these micro-level psychological processes to macro-level outcomes: how democratic institutions withstand—or fail to withstand—organized influence campaigns, extremist mobilization, and rapid technological change.
- Application. Translating findings into robust interventions and practical tools—communication strategies that improve accuracy, educational approaches that build critical evaluation, computational systems that detect coordinated manipulation, and policy guidance that supports institutional stability.
Contact
Anton Gollwitzer
Professor, Department of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour
anton.gollwitzer@bi.no
Oslo
Jonas R. Kunst
Professor, Department of Communication and Culture
jonas.r.kunst@bi.no
Oslo