Top 3 Reasons Misinformation Spreads
How do we cope in a post-truth society? If the President of the United States can continue to lie about how he won an election that all facts have proven he lost and people continue to support him, how do we move forward? When people can spot misinformation but still choose to spread it on social media, what hope do we have that truth can prevail?
The good news is that there is a way forward, according to Beth Anne Helgason and Daniel A. Effron in their latest article in the journal Current Opinion Psychology. In The Moral Psychology of Misinformation, Helgason and Effron note that there are three reasons why people are willing to spread falsehoods even when they know the truth: partisanship, imagination, and repetition.
According to the research, partisanship affects a person's willingness to share misinformation. As we become more partisan, we also become more willing to do whatever is necessary to see our political enemies lose. So while a person may read a story they know is fake news, if sharing the story will hurt an opponent, they are less likely to think it morally wrong to share the story. Especially if the story fits into what Helgason and Effron call the "gist" of a story fits what an individual knows or believes to be true.
The gist also comes into play with a person's imagination. Helgason and Effron speak of a counterfactual world, where we imagine realities that do not exist but could. The other side of how imaginations lower inhibitions against spreading fake news is a prefactual world, where we imagine a world that does not exist but could. Almost as if we are willing the imaginary world into existence. Our ability to imagine counterfactual or prefactual makes it seem less unethical to spread misinformation.
The last barrier to spreading misinformation is repetition. The greater the number of times we see a fake story, the more likely we believe it is okay to share the story. So it is not just that repeatedly seeing misinformation can increase our willingness to accept a report; repetition also increases the likelihood we will share a story that we know to be false.
So, where is the good news? Helgason and Effron note that we can combat the issues posed by imagination and repetition in relatively simple and straightforward ways. For imagination, where the gist of a story rings true, we must encourage people, including ourselves, to focus on the precise truth of a story. Maybe we can imagine a world where Trump won the 2020 election, but that world does not exist. We must deal with the precise facts. Absurdity can also be helpful here. We can imagine a world where Trump won in 2020, but we can also imagine a world where Kanye West primaried Trump in 2020 and won the nomination. Just because we can imagine something does not mean it is accurate. When it comes to repetition, we need to focus on moral reasoning to snap us out of the numbing effect repetition can have on us.
The bad news is that the only way to stop partisanship from lowering our inhibitions against spreading misinformation is to become less partisan. There is not a quick or straightforward method to ending partisanship. However, as noted in previous newsletters, a beginning step is to stop viewing everyone who disagrees with us as a threat. Only by lowering the temperature of partisan animosity can we hope to move forward.
3 More Things
1) For The New York Times, Stuart Thompson reports on the overall message from conservative radio as we head into the midterm elections: Democrats cheat. Thompson notes that even with some radio stations making it clear that their hosts are not allowed to talk about the "stolen" 2020 election, right-wing radio personalities are finding ways around these prohibitions. Especially because engagement is the end goal of talk radio, and nothing engages conservatives more now than misinformation about cheating Democrats.
2) In the never-ending saga about QAnon, Kieran Press-Reynolds writes for Insider about what it means for the movement that Q has started posting again. The good news is that Q's long absence and the fallout from January 6 make it unlikely that Q's return will capture the same lightning in a bottle. The bad news is that Q influencers no longer rely on Q to spread the Q narrative. So even if Q's return does not signal much, that is because, in a way, Q has already worked, and the virus has been spreading and will continue to spread.
3) Writing for his substack, Joel Mathis has an excellent takedown that reads like a test case for Helgason and Effron's point about how partisanship affects our willingness to spread misinformation. You may have seen the viral tweet where AZ Rep. Debbie Lesko appears to be saying she would kill her grandchildren to ensure the right to own a gun. Mathis notes that what is most likely happening here, if we are willing to offer Lesko some grace, is that she flubbed her words. But some on the left are so willing to believe the worst about any Republican it does not matter.