{"id":156725,"date":"2024-07-31T15:52:15","date_gmt":"2024-07-31T23:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156725"},"modified":"2024-07-31T17:21:26","modified_gmt":"2024-08-01T01:21:26","slug":"not-born-yesterday-the-science-of-who-we-trust-and-what-we-believe-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156725","title":{"rendered":"Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hugo Mercier wrote in this 2020 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n* Writers for the Washington Post and Foreign Policy claim Donald Trump was elected thanks to the \u201cgullibility\u201d of \u201cignorant\u201d voters. A common view of Brexit\u2014the vote for Britain to leave the European Union\u2014is to see the Brexiters as \u201cuneducated plebs\u201d while those who voted remain are \u201csophisticated, cultured and cosmopolitan.\u201d<\/p>\n

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
\nchildren master more complex cognitive skills, they become \u201cless gullible.\u201d Another states, more sweepingly, that \u201cchildren, it seems, are an advertiser\u2019s dream: gullible, vulnerable, and an easy sell.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014long established in psychology and recently popularized by psychologist Daniel Kahneman\u2019s Thinking, Fast and Slow\u2014some cognitive processes are fast, effortless, largely unconscious, and they belong to System 1…<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s choices, searched for explanations. Fake news was a common answer. <\/p>\n

\u201cFake News Handed Brexiteers the Referendum\u201d was the title of an article in the Independent, a British newspaper. Across the Atlantic, the Washington Post ran a piece claiming, \u201cFake News Might Have Won Donald Trump the 2016 Election.\u201d Even when it is not about politics, fake news is scary: a piece in Nature (one of the world\u2019s foremost scientific publications) suggested that \u201cthe biggest pandemic risk\u201d was \u201cviral misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some fake news spread the old-school way, carried, for instance, by \u201cBrexit buses\u201d claiming the United Kingdom was sending \u00a3350 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s prejudices and polarize the population, leading to extreme political views.<\/p>\n

What do the humoral theory of disease, blood libels, and Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cwrong\u201d way because they are misled by fake news.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019t casual Republicans but \u201cintense partisans,\u201d \u201cthe 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets.\u201d These people were very unlikely to have turned from Hillary voters to Trump supporters. Instead, they were scouting the web\u2014not only fake news websites but also the traditional press\u2014for ways of justifying their upcoming decision to vote for Trump, or of demonstrating their support.<\/p>\n

A study by Brendan Nyhan and his colleagues supports this interpretation. Trump supporters were provided with accurate information correcting some of Trump\u2019s false statements (rather than fake news, but the principle is the same). Most of them accepted
\nthe corrections. Yet the supporters didn\u2019t waver in their support for Trump. This suggests that the initial acceptance of the false statements hadn\u2019t caused their support for Trump. Rather, they had accepted the statements because they supported Trump.<\/p>\n

* Some political fake news\u2014for instance, \u201cWikiLeaks: Clinton Bribed 6 Republicans to \u2018Destroy Trump\u2019 \u201d\u2014might 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., \u201c[Evangelical leader Franklin] Graham Says Christians Must Support Trump or Face Death Camps\u201d). In this respect, political fake news resembles other fake news. In 2017, the biggest hit was \u201cBabysitter Transported to Hospital after Inserting a Baby in Her Vagina\u201d; in 2016, the runner-up was \u201cWoman Arrested for Defecating on Boss\u2019 Desk after Winning the Lottery.\u201d35 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.<\/p>\n

* even people who recognized that some of their views were mistaken (in this case, some of Donald Trump\u2019s 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\u2014such as the canards of eighteenth-century France\u2014with 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 \u201cthe head of a Fury, wings like a bat, a gigantic body covered in scales, and a dragon-like tail.\u201d64 But when people wanted to give voice to their prejudices, the canards obliged, for instance, by inserting Marie Antoinette\u2019s head in lieu of that of the Fury to please the revolutionary crowds. And if newspapers couldn\u2019t do it, word of mouth would. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hugo Mercier wrote in this 2020 book: * Writers for the Washington Post and Foreign Policy claim Donald Trump was elected thanks to the \u201cgullibility\u201d of \u201cignorant\u201d voters. A common view of Brexit\u2014the vote for Britain to leave the European … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42951,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epistemics","category-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=156725"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156736,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156725\/revisions\/156736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=156725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=156725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=156725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}