* Writers for the Washington Post and Foreign Policy claim Donald Trump was elected thanks to the “gullibility” of “ignorant” voters. A common view of Brexit—the vote for Britain to leave the European Union—is to see the Brexiters as “uneducated plebs” while those who voted remain are “sophisticated, cultured and cosmopolitan.”
In contemporary academic literature, the link between unsophistication and credulity mostly takes two forms. The first is in children, whose lack of cognitive maturity is often associated with gullibility. A recent psychology textbook asserts that as
children master more complex cognitive skills, they become “less gullible.” Another states, more sweepingly, that “children, it seems, are an advertiser’s dream: gullible, vulnerable, and an easy sell.”
The second way in which lack of cognitive sophistication and credulity are linked is through a popular division of thought processes into two main types, so-called System 1 and System 2. According to this view—long established in psychology and recently popularized by psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow—some cognitive processes are fast, effortless, largely unconscious, and they belong to System 1…
* In 2017, the Collins dictionary designated fake news, information that has no basis in fact but is presented as factual, its word of the year. This decision was a reaction to the abuse of fake news in two events that took place in 2016: the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, and the decision made in the United Kingdom, by referendum, to leave the European Union (Brexit). In both countries, a large majority of the elites and the traditional media, surprised and dismayed by people’s choices, searched for explanations. Fake news was a common answer.
“Fake News Handed Brexiteers the Referendum” was the title of an article in the Independent, a British newspaper. Across the Atlantic, the Washington Post ran a piece claiming, “Fake News Might Have Won Donald Trump the 2016 Election.” Even when it is not about politics, fake news is scary: a piece in Nature (one of the world’s foremost scientific publications) suggested that “the biggest pandemic risk” was “viral misinformation.”
Some fake news spread the old-school way, carried, for instance, by “Brexit buses” claiming the United Kingdom was sending £350 million a week to Brussels that could be redirected to the health services instead (in fact, the number is nowhere near that high, and most of the money goes back to the United Kingdom anyway). But fake news, which has always existed in one form or another, was seen as particularly threatening this time around because social media had vastly expanded its reach.10 In the three months leading up to Donald Trump’s election, the twenty most popular fake news stories related to the election garnered more than eight million shares, comments, and likes on Facebook. Among the most popular fake news were stories about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent, selling weapons to the terrorists of ISIS, or the pope endorsing Trump. Through the sharing of fake news, and of partisan news more generally, social media have been accused of creating echo chambers that amplify people’s prejudices and polarize the population, leading to extreme political views.
What do the humoral theory of disease, blood libels, and Trump’s endorsement by Pope Francis have in common? Obviously, they are inaccurate pieces of information. They are also linked with outcomes ranging from the clearly terrible (ethnic attacks, the systematic mistreatment of patients) to the arguably suboptimal (Trump’s election, Brexit). It would be natural to think that these false beliefs led directly to the outcomes described: physicians practice bloodletting because they accept the humoral theory of disease; ethnic minorities are massacred because of the atrocities they are accused of committing; people vote the “wrong” way because they are misled by fake news.
* What about fake news, then? Can it sway momentous political decisions? Here I focus on the election of Donald Trump, the event for which the most data are available. At the individual level, there was a correlation between viewing fake news websites, which overwhelmingly supported Trump, and being a Trump supporter.21 At the state level, the more people visited fake news websites, the more likely the state was to vote for Trump. Does this mean that viewing fake news prompted people to vote for Trump? Not necessarily. The majority of people who visited fake news websites weren’t casual Republicans but “intense partisans,” “the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets.” These people were very unlikely to have turned from Hillary voters to Trump supporters. Instead, they were scouting the web—not only fake news websites but also the traditional press—for ways of justifying their upcoming decision to vote for Trump, or of demonstrating their support.
A study by Brendan Nyhan and his colleagues supports this interpretation. Trump supporters were provided with accurate information correcting some of Trump’s false statements (rather than fake news, but the principle is the same). Most of them accepted
the corrections. Yet the supporters didn’t waver in their support for Trump. This suggests that the initial acceptance of the false statements hadn’t caused their support for Trump. Rather, they had accepted the statements because they supported Trump.
* Some political fake news—for instance, “WikiLeaks: Clinton Bribed 6 Republicans to ‘Destroy Trump’ ”—might sound plausible enough, at least to people with little knowledge of politics; that is, most of the electorate. But many stories would presumably sound quite absurd to almost everybody (e.g., “[Evangelical leader Franklin] Graham Says Christians Must Support Trump or Face Death Camps”). In this respect, political fake news resembles other fake news. In 2017, the biggest hit was “Babysitter Transported to Hospital after Inserting a Baby in Her Vagina”; in 2016, the runner-up was “Woman Arrested for Defecating on Boss’ Desk after Winning the Lottery.”35 As suggested by cultural evolution researcher Alberto Acerbi, the most implausible fake news stories, whether or not they are political, spread largely because they are entertaining rather than because they offer justifications for anything.36 The most absurd political fake news stories might also owe their appeal precisely to their over-the-top nature, as they make for great burning-bridges material.
* even people who recognized that some of their views were mistaken (in this case, some of Donald Trump’s untrue statements they had accepted) did not change their underlying preferences (voting for Trump). As long as the demand for justifications is present, some will rise to fulfill it. Before the internet made fake news visible for everyone to gloat at its absurdity, it could be found in the pages of specialized newspapers—such as the canards of eighteenth-century France—with exactly the same patterns as those observed now. Most of the time, the news was pure sensationalism: one of these canards announced the discovery in Chile of a creature with “the head of a Fury, wings like a bat, a gigantic body covered in scales, and a dragon-like tail.”64 But when people wanted to give voice to their prejudices, the canards obliged, for instance, by inserting Marie Antoinette’s head in lieu of that of the Fury to please the revolutionary crowds. And if newspapers couldn’t do it, word of mouth would.
