One Key Reason People Believe and Share Misinformation
Psypost reported on a study finding that people with heightened anxiety are more likely to believe in claims they read and share on social media. The study also found that much of our reasoning is based on whatever political party we identify with. This "partisan motivated reasoning" means that we, essentially, work backward to justify our previously held beliefs by accepting or ignoring information that aligns with what we already find to be credible or trustworthy.
Ideologically extreme Republicans were more likely to believe misinformation than ideologically extreme Democrats, but centrist Republicans were better at identifying misinformation than centrist Democrats.
This study helps paint the picture of our current misinformation landscape. It makes sense that we would be more willing to trust information from sources that we already find credible and worth reading. And this is precisely what the study finds. But this is not the whole picture regarding the growth of misinformation and conspiracy theories; there is another component.
A few weeks back, we shared a link to a Vanity Fair story taken from a chapter for Will Sommer's new book Trust the Plan about the rise and staying power of QAnon. The excerpt is worth reading, but Sommer's book helps to fill in the larger picture of the increase in misinformation and conspiracy theories. One through line in Sommer's book helps us understand this rise and might also tell us how to stop the spread.
Throughout Trust the Plan, Sommer discusses how many people who have fallen for Q have nothing tethering them to the world around them. Chapter 10, “When Dad Takes the Red Pill,” hits on this thread that Sommer has been building to. The chapter tells the story of what happens to the relationship between a father and son when QAnon takes root in the family's life. David, the father, talks to Sommer about his son, Nathan, and how Nathan came to believe in QAnon. David talks of how Nathan has always been prone to conspiratorial thinking. However, QAnon hooked Nathan when he had to move back in with his parents as an adult and lost connection to his relationships outside his parents. Nathan turned to his computer and the QAnon community to find those connections.
In this chapter, Sommer also mentions a psychiatrist in Maryland, Sean Heffernan, who started researching QAnon after seeing QAnon bumper stickers on the cars of wealthy soccer moms. Heffernan thought it was strange to see such a proliferation of QAnon members in the affluent suburbs of Maryland. Q believers had, to this point, typically been people on the fringes of society. But Heffernan thinks Q taking root in affluent areas involves people losing real-world relationships.
Sommer reaches this conclusion himself in chapter 13, “QAnon Goes Abroad,” where Sommer states, "QAnon reaches vulnerable people who feel dislocated in the modern world, assuring them that their lives have a greater meaning and that the people they dislike are inherently evil." This links back with the study PsyPost reports on, especially that heightened anxiety increases the chances people will share misinformation on social media.
Social media has undoubtedly made it easier to share conspiracies and misinformation, but we cannot blame them entirely for the rise of QAnon and other conspiracies. Instead, we must consider that we live in a time when people have heightened anxiety and are losing their real-world connections for many reasons. This means the solution to our misinformation and conspiracy problem will not be throwing information at people because wrong information is a symptom of a more significant problem. Sommer's book makes clear what we have said before, but it bears repeating that the best way to combat conspiracies is two-fold:
1) Don't cut off relationships with people trapped in conspiratorial thinking.
2) Focus on the things you have in common, like sports, books, tv shows, or hobbies that have nothing to do with the conspiracy they focused on.
It can be hard to do this, as David mentions in Sommer's book, when your loved one is screaming at you about a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles, but the best way to care for those trapped in these patterns is still to love them out of it.
5 More Things:
1) Writing for The Bulwark, Mona Charen has an essential reminder to avoid getting caught up in all the news that makes us sick. We can find all kinds of doomsday information about Q or climate change, but Charen reminds us that while these might cause us to despair, the headlines we see are not the complete picture.
2) AI continues to be a source of stress, even as it brings some joy. You may have seen the viral photo of the Pope in a puffy white coat; what you may not have noticed is that AI-generated it. Buzzfeed News spoke to the creator of the photo. The main takeaway here is just how good AI is getting at fooling us, which should encourage us to be more diligent in verifying the information we come across.
3) At Trump's recent rally in Waco, the former president used footage from the Jan 6th insurrection to glorify the insurrectionists. In a turn of potentially good news, NBC News reports that some Republicans are pushing back against Trump using the footage this way. Most notable is Lindsay Graham, supporter and golf buddy of the former president, who NBC quoted saying, "January 6 was one of the worst days in American history. Everybody's entitled to due process. If you're trying to suggest that those who were involved in January the 6th are some kind of hero? No. There will be no effort on my part to whitewash January 6." Let's hope Graham and others mean what they say.
4) Semafor's David Weigel has good reporting on the right's new use of viral videos. Reporting on a short viral video that allegedly shows a Black man harassing an Asian passerby in New York City, Weigel notes that the right's focus on this kind of race-baiting video is not new and seldom tells the whole story. Still, it does tell the story that fits the right's narrative.
5) Ray Epps, the man at the center of a Jan 6th conspiracy that he, working with the FBI, instigated the riot, is asking Fox News to detract its "false and defamatory statements," according to the New York Times. Epps' lawyer sent a letter to Tucker Carlson demanding an apology from Carlson for spreading "fanciful notions that are demonstrably false" on Carlson's show. The fallout from Dominion's lawsuit against Fox seems not limited to just the internal memos and texts we've seen showing that Fox employees knew they were misleading their employees. Others, like Epps, are now working to get Fox to correct its misinformation.