Teaching vigilance when the crowd pretends: lessons in misinformation from a fable

It’s strange how easily the old stories keep up with the new tricks.

As part of an interdisciplinary unit with our Grade-10 students, combining English and Individuals & Societies (I&S), we explored how misinformation shapes public belief and behavior. In I&S, students studied real-world examples such as political propaganda, conspiracy theories, and media manipulation. In English, we extended these discussions into literature, investigating how fictional narratives also construct and sustain illusions.

Alongside other short stories, we used the fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen, as a key fictional case study. Literary scholars such as Jack Zipes have argued that fairy tales historically function both as entertainment and as cultural tools for social instruction, often reinforcing or questioning prevailing norms. This made the fable a fitting text to explore how narratives shape public belief.

Literary Misinformation: Mapping the Strategies

Although often classified as a fairy tale, Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes has also been interpreted by scholars such as Hollis Robbins as a sharp political allegory, illustrating how power, fear, and social conformity suppress truth. Applying misinformation strategies to this fable gave students a practical way to uncover how literary narratives can model the same patterns of deception they had studied in real-world contexts.

Here’s how they connected the fable to specific misinformation strategies:

Selective Emphasis

One of the most prominent misinformation strategies in The Emperor’s New Clothes is selective emphasis. Throughout the story, the members of the court focus their comments on the supposed beauty, craftsmanship, and magnificence of the emperor’s “new clothes,” while deliberately ignoring the obvious fact that he is wearing nothing at all. By highlighting only socially acceptable aspects of the situation and avoiding the uncomfortable reality, the characters help sustain the illusion. Students connected this strategy to how modern misinformation often works; not by inventing false facts, but by distorting emphasis to manipulate perception, much like the techniques they had identified in conspiracy theories.

Fearmongering

Fearmongering also plays a central role in the fable. The weavers warn that anyone who cannot see the cloth must be incompetent or unfit for office. This implied threat creates an atmosphere of fear among the emperor's court and the townspeople. Rather than directly threatening them, the weavers rely on fear of shame and professional ruin to silence dissent. Students recognized the parallels to how fear is used in contemporary misinformation; not through direct threats, but through reputational pressure, as seen in phenomena like cancel culture and online shaming.

Bandwagon Effect

The bandwagon effect is clearly visible in the way the emperor’s most trusted officials pretend to admire the invisible clothes, prompting others to do the same. One by one, ministers, advisors, and eventually the whole crowd publicly affirm what they do not actually see. As more people endorse the false narrative, the social risk of dissent increases. Students related this to how misinformation today often gains credibility through mass repetition—such as viral posts, trending hashtags, or echo chambers created by coordinated sharing on social media.

Appeal to Emotion

Finally, appeals to emotion are critical to sustaining the deception. The weavers manipulate the emperor’s pride, suggesting that only the wise and capable can appreciate the special fabric. His desire for validation clouds his judgment, making him emotionally invested in defending the lie to the point where he would continue walking naked on the street even though the lie has been exposed. Students observed that emotional manipulation remains a powerful tool in misinformation, often bypassing critical thinking and reinforcing belief through pride, fear, or outrage. They connected this particularly to the beauty industry on social media, where curated images, filters, and aspirational messaging often appeal to pride and self-worth.

Creative Application and What It Revealed

As the final task for the unit, students created a vlog post or podcast episode that deliberately used misinformation techniques they had studied. While there was no requirement to manipulate emotions, many of the most persuasive pieces naturally triggered strong emotional responses, demonstrating how easily feelings can be exploited when information is distorted.

What stood out most was the choices they made. None of the students chose to use fiction or storytelling as their format. Most gravitated toward advertising, using it to craft persuasive misinformation.

Their choices revealed what matters to them when asked to manipulate an audience. Many chose to highlight the hypocrisy of educational institutions promoting freedom of thought while enforcing conformity. Some satirized the beauty industry’s promises. A few explored complex topics like financial markets, though at times they lost me in the jargon.

Interestingly, no one chose a traditional fairy tale format; yet all instinctively embodied the Trickster figure, a recurring archetype in global mythology characterized by cunning, subversion of norms, and testing the boundaries of truth and authority. In mythological studies, Tricksters often expose societal hypocrisies by bending the very rules that others unquestioningly obey. My students used every rhetorical strategy available to them, seeing how far they could push before credibility snapped.

It raised an unsettling but important question: Was I teaching them to lie and deceive? No. The purpose was—and I hope it stayed clear—that if you can so easily create misinformation, you must be even more vigilant about resisting it.

Final Reflection

Literary works such as The Emperor’s New Clothes—allegories—I reminded them, don’t just reflect life. They interrogate it. They train us to scrutinize, to question, to notice the gap between what’s said and what’s true.

In this unit, that meant treating The Emperor’s New Clothes not as a favorite childhood bedtime story, but as a warning. The same misinformation strategies we studied (selective emphasis, fearmongering, emotional appeals) were right there in Andersen’s fable. The courtiers who stayed silent. The emperor who insisted. The crowd who played along. And the one voice that broke the illusion.

So, I told them, when you do not see any clothes, do not let fear keep you silent. Seek the truth. Find it. And then speak it — consequences be damned.

Hopefully, teaching units like this will mean that someday, there are fewer naked emperors wandering the streets and fewer crowds pretending not to notice.