Cognitive Warfare: The Invisible Battle for Reality and Trust

This article was originally published to Deft9.com

Tanna M. Krewson, MA, PhD (ABD), March 2025

Since the end of World War II, conventional interstate wars have become less frequent, largely due to increased global trade and regional cooperation through institutions like the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, while cross-border wars have declined, internal conflicts, insurgencies, and social upheavals have become more common, signaling a shift in traditional conceptions of warfare. As warfare has evolved, so have the strategies used to achieve influence and control. Modern conflicts are no longer just about territorial conquests but about shaping perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors. Modern conflicts increasingly unfold beyond conventional battlefields, often within urban environments or new domains like cyberspace. This evolution reflects a broader expansion of warfare, where adversaries no longer target just territory or resources but also the fundamental structures of societies themselves.

These transformations are occurring alongside rapid societal changes, driven by technological advances that have reshaped how people interact and engage with the world. With the rise of digital technology, individuals can now connect with others across the globe, creating an interconnected humanity that is, quite literally, at our fingertips.

From a social science perspective, further research is needed to understand how our growing dependence on technology and information impacts us as individuals and societies over time. According to the Digital 2025 Global Overview Report, people worldwide spend an average of 6 hours and 40 minutes per day in front of a screen, with 4 of those hours on their phones. In the United States, the national average is slightly higher at 7 hours and 3 minutes, while in South Africa, the daily average reaches 9 hours and 24 minutes. These trends illustrate the shifts in how people consume and process information, underscoring the need to examine the implications of our increasingly digital world.

But what does this mean in practice? It is easy to wax poetic, using data and broad-brush academic language to illuminate the world’s problems, but that does little to explain what this new world means for our daily lives.

At restaurants, it is common to see whole families on their smartphones, scrolling instead of talking; posting pictures of their food so other people also not engaging with their families can be impressed. And, whilst many of us are guilty of falling prey to this technological trap, particularly in the name of constant connection, it is important to accept that our somewhat human inclination to check out from our private lives by checking in to social media is a multifaceted problem. Aside from raising questions about the strength of our interpersonal relationships, it raises additional questions about how individuals handle everyday emotional challenges, such as the ability to cope with boredom, emotional disconnection, burnout, and social awkwardness. This increasing digital immersion does more than alter how we socialize; it reshapes how we process and trust information, creating new vulnerabilities that adversaries can exploit.

We also need to ask ourselves what this dynamic—which stretches across nations and cultures—says about the overarching direction of our societies. Who are we giving our time to? And what opportunities does our distracted attention provide for malign actors to tell us how the world looks through digital content designed to manipulate what we think and how we behave en masse?

Interestingly, studies have already demonstrated that disinformation, “fake news,” and foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) are a growing problem. However, many individuals who recognize that a macro-level issue exists are inclined to simultaneously believe they are immune to individual influence. This dissonance between our broader understanding that something is changing within our information environment versus our lack of understanding that we, ourselves, are changing results from our brain’s propensity to default to cognitive biases and heuristics, creating one of the most significant security challenges of our time.

In this new digitally connected, informationally saturated world, our brains are both the target and the weapon. How we think, what we devote our time to, and how we perceive reality can be subtly—and intentionally—manipulated by malign and/or opportunistic actors, negating the need to cross international borders to produce effects.

If individuals, entities, or governments can shape how people feel and perceive the world, they can also influence their behavior and decisions. This is the essence of Reflexive Control Theory—an element of non-linear warfare employed by Russia since the 1950s. In this space, targeting identities matters more than targeting actions. Who people believe they are and whom they align with is far more consequential than what they do, because identity is tied to powerful emotions: pride, belonging, shame, empathy, anger, and fear. The ability to manipulate these emotions through information dictates behavior, creating a feedback loop—actions reinforce identity, and identity drives actions. Mastering this loop is the essence of power.

Pair this paradigm with the dominance of technology and the countless hours we spend engaging with it, and identity becomes a weapon. People—knowingly or unknowingly—can be manipulated into spreading manufactured emotions and beliefs, turning their minds into tools for targeting others. Malign actors exploit this vulnerability, using cognitive influence to reshape perceptions and drive division.

Some might argue that this is nothing new—that humans have always spread emotions and beliefs and that all warfare, propaganda, and communication have cognitive effects. In this view, influence is simply a fact of life, unremarkable in its ubiquity. After all, many of us were raised with the idea that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt us.

However, from a social and neuroscientific standpoint, we know this idiom is untrue. Emotions, beliefs, narratives, and worldviews can be powerful enough to hurt us—to make individuals, groups, and even nations do things with real-world consequences, like doubting the outcome of an election, staging an uprising, or rejecting democratic institutions. This is a real threat to any democracy because these emotionally driven forces comprise “the will of the people,” an idea forming the bedrock of our democratic values. However, democracies and the belief systems that sustain them are not static. On the contrary, they are mercurial, often unpredictable—arguably fickle—and highly susceptible to persuasion and manipulation.

At a training event I led last year, a participant shared that he no longer trusted any information not verified by government intelligence or military sources. In his professional and private life, he assumed information was likely false if it was not officially validated. While I understood—and still understand—his reasoning, his comment made me pause. What does his view say about the current state of our global information environment, and how many people feel this way? Moreover, while reasonable in an era of rampant disinformation, this sentiment raises concerns about over-reliance on institutional verification and the broader implications of skepticism toward independent sources of truth.

If trust is one of the fundamental pillars of a functioning democracy—enabling governments, institutions, and multinational alliances to exist via “the will of the people”—what happens when that tenuous trust erodes? What does it mean to communicate in an environment where information is so thoroughly manipulated, altered, and weaponized that our brains struggle to distinguish between reality and fabrication? Because, at its core, cognitive warfare is not just about altering what we think or how we behave. Its true power lies in eroding trust itself—until societies become so fractured, so uncertain of what is real, that they cease to believe in anything at all. In this dystopian world, would we even notice if the will of the people became the will of the adversary? Or, more importantly, would we even care?