The truth won’t set us free?
by digby
In a modern democracy, peddling conspiracies for political advantage is perhaps not so different from seeding an epidemic.
If a virus is to gain a foothold with the electorate, it will need a population of likely believers (“susceptibles” in public-health speak), a germ nimble enough to infect new hosts easily (an irresistible tall tale), and an eager “Amen choir” (also known as “super-spreaders”).
Unleashed on the body politic, a falsehood may spread across the social networks that supply us with information. Facebook is a doorknob slathered in germs, Twitter a sneezing coworker, and Instagram a child returning home after a day at school, ensuring the exposure of all.
But if lies, conspiracies and fake news are really like germs, you might think that fact-checking is the cure, and truth an effective antidote.
If only it were that easy.
New research offers fresh insights into the stubborn role of ideology in maintaining support for those who peddle falsehoods, and the limited power of fact-checking to change voters’ minds. Even in the face of immediate and authoritative corrections, we humans don’t budge easily, or for long, from established opinions about politics, politicians and the coverage they receive.
And some of us — in particular, those who endorse conservative positions — are quicker to believe assertions that warn of grim consequences or of sinister forces at work.
The findings of three new studies suggest that fact-checkers had better be persistent, and that their expectations of changing people’s minds had better be modest.
But the research also suggests that if fact-checkers want the truth to matter, they should not be shy about touting the value of their services.
People believe what they want to believe. But some people really want to believe stupid things apparently.
This is a testament to the efficacy of propaganda. And I’d assume that Trump’s “fake news” crusade is having an effect too. The article discusses a number of studies recently about how this works and it won’t make you optimistic.
One study, in particular, was kind of scary:
It tested the idea that people are more inclined to believe unproven conspiracy theories when their party is out of power, a notion sometimes called the “conspiracy belief is for losers” hypothesis.
The study was led by UCLA anthropologist Daniel Fessler, who found that people whose political stances aligned them with American conservatism were far more likely than liberals to embrace falsehoods that warned of grim consequences.
Americans who hew to more progressive political stances were certainly credulous as well, the UCLA team found. But they were no more likely to believe a scary falsehood — say, that a drunken airline passenger could pry open a plane’s door in midair — than they were to buy into the far less terrifying myth that you can burn more calories by exercising on an empty stomach.
But were these inclinations real and enduring, or could they be explained by the fact that, when the experiment was run in October 2015 and September 2016, conservatives had been out of the White House for several years?
Fessler and Theodore Samore, a graduate student in UCLA’s anthropology department, repeated the experiment in 2016, after Donald Trump had won the presidential election, and in 2017, after Georgia Democrat Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore in a special election for a Senate seat. After Trump’s triumph, the researchers reasoned, conservatives should feel empowered and confident. After Jones’ victory, they presumed, liberals would likely feel hopeful once more.
But their original findings did not change: As they moved further right on the ideological spectrum, people were consistently more likely to believe frightening false claims, and found them more credible than emotionally neutral falsehoods. The results were published last week in PLOS One.
“It seems there’s just a fundamental difference in how credulous people are about hazards as a function of their orientation,” Fessler said. “How positively people feel about their party’s future doesn’t matter.”
That dynamic has worrisome implications: When believers of ominous warnings succeed at the polls, “they have the megaphone that power brings,” Fessler said. “And they use that — whether cynically or genuinely I can’t tell — to issue additional proclamations of danger.”
This, he said, has been Trump’s stock in trade — foreign powers are taking advantage of the United States, dangerous hordes are storming the borders, and we need to build a wall to keep would-be invaders at bay.
“That cycle is very difficult to break,” Fessler said. What’s more, warning people who are inclined to believe that kind of narrative that they’re being lied to seems more likely to reinforce the conspiracy theory than to induce a change of heart.
“I do worry,” he said.
It’s their worldview. And it’s always been a major characteristic of a certain conservative faction in American politics. We just haven’t a leader emerge full-blown from that toxic fever swamp before.
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