‘The Law of the Dog’ — Emotion and Motivation in Teaching Children About New Media

Our recent book, The Imaginationless Generation, sets out our Media Engagement Theory which seeks to describe and thereby assert some control over the interface between mass media and the human psyche. The Media Engagement Theory offers values-based and cultural modes of regulation to tackle the harms posed to children by mass media and disruptive new technologies. Here, we build on this theory through an exploration of the ‘Law of the Dog,’ which is an innovative educational approach that teaches children to approach their screens with an informed and skeptical indifference — in the same manner that an animal would meet a novel object in its environment, before it knows whether or not that object poses a threat. This discussion will draw upon evolutionary psychology to argue why the emotions of ‘vigilance’ and ‘aversion’ are especially effective in teaching children how to approach new media. We aim to teach children to become cautious skeptics rather than naïve and enthusiastic consumers. With the rise of deep fakes and false information flooding the Internet, this approach has value for the broader audience as well.