'Belonging is stronger than facts': The age of misinformation

Social and psychological forces are making people prone to sharing and believing misinformation, some experts believe. Photo / AP

There's a decent chance you've had at least one of these rumours, all false, relayed to you as fact recently: that President Joe Biden plans to force Americans to eat less meat; that the state of Virginia is eliminating advanced math in schools to advance racial equality; and that border officials are mass-purchasing copies of Vice President Kamala Harris' book to hand out to refugee children.

All were amplified by partisan actors. But you're just as likely, if not more so, to have heard it relayed from someone you know. And you may have noticed that these cycles of falsehood-fuelled outrage keep recurring.

We are in an era of endemic misinformation — and outright disinformation. Plenty of bad actors are helping the trend along. But the real drivers, some experts believe, are social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation in the first place. And those forces are only on the rise.

"Why are misperceptions about contentious issues in politics and science seemingly so persistent and difficult to correct?" Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist, posed in a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's not for want of good information, which is ubiquitous. Exposure to good information does not reliably instill accurate beliefs anyway. Rather, Nyhan writes, a growing body of evidence suggests that the ultimate culprits are "cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and political elites."

Put more simply, people become more prone to misinformation when three things happen. First, and perhaps most important, is when conditions in society make people feel a greater need for what social scientists call ingrouping — a belief that their social identity is a source of strength and superiority, and that other groups can be blamed for their problems.

As much as we like to think of ourselves as rational beings who put truth-seeking above all else, we are social animals wired for survival. In times of perceived conflict or social change, we seek security in groups. And that makes us eager to consume information, true or not, that lets us see the world as a conflict putting our righteous ingroup against a nefarious outgroup.

This need can emerge especially out of a sense of social destabilisation. As a result, misinformation is often prevalent among communities that feel destabilised by unwanted change or, in the case of some minorities, powerless in the face of dominant forces.

Framing everything as a grand conflict against scheming enemies can feel enormously reassuring. And that's why perhaps the greatest culprit of our era of misinformation may be, more than any one particular misinformer, the era-defining rise in social polarisation.

"At the mass level, greater partisan divisions in social identity are generating intense hostility toward opposition partisans," which has "seemingly increased the political system's vulnerability to partisan misinformation," Nyhan wrote in an earlier paper.

We are eager to consume information, true or not, that lets us see the world as a conflict putting our righteous ingroup against a nefarious outgroup. Photo / AP

Growing hostility between the two halves of America feeds social distrust, which makes people more prone to rumour and falsehood. It also makes people cling much more tightly to their partisan identities. And once our brains switch into "identity-based conflict" mode, we become desperately hungry for information that will affirm that sense of us versus them, and much less concerned about things like truth or accuracy.

In an email, Nyhan said it can be methodologically difficult to nail down the precise relationship between overall polarisation in society and overall misinformation, but there is abundant evidence that an individual with more polarised views becomes more prone to believing falsehoods.

The second driver of the misinformation era is the emergence of high-profile political figures who encourage their followers to go ahead and indulge their desire for identity-affirming misinformation. After all, an atmosphere of all-out political conflict often benefits those leaders, at least in the short term, by rallying people behind them.

And then there is the third factor — a shift to social media, which is a powerful outlet for composers of disinformation, a pervasive vector for misinformation itself and a multiplier of the other risk factors.

"Media has changed, the environment has changed, and that has a potentially big impact on our natural behaviour," said William Brady, a Yale University social psychologist.

"When you post things, you're highly aware of the feedback that you get, the social feedback in terms of likes and shares," Brady said. So when misinformation appeals to social impulses more than the truth does, it gets more attention online, which means people feel rewarded and encouraged for spreading it.

"Depending on the platform, especially, humans are very sensitive to social reward," he said. Research demonstrates that people who get positive feedback for posting inflammatory or false statements become much likelier to do so again in the future. "You are affected by that."

When misinformation appeals to social impulses more than the truth does, it gets more attention online, which means people feel rewarded and encouraged for spreading it. Photo / AP

In 2016, media scholars Jieun Shin and Kjerstin Thorson analysed a dataset of 300 million tweets from the 2012 election. Twitter users, they found, "selectively share fact-checking messages that cheerlead their own candidate and denigrate the opposing party's candidate." And when users encountered a fact-check that revealed their candidate had gotten something wrong, their response wasn't to get mad at the politician for lying. It was to attack the fact checkers.

"We have found that Twitter users tend to retweet to show approval, argue, gain attention and entertain," researcher Jon-Patrick Allem wrote last year, summarising a study he had co-authored. "Truthfulness of a post or accuracy of a claim was not an identified motivation for retweeting."

In another study, published last month in Nature, a team of psychologists tracked thousands of users interacting with false information. Republican test subjects who were shown a false headline about migrants trying to enter the United States ("Over 500 'Migrant Caravaners' Arrested With Suicide Vests") mostly identified it as false; only 16 per cent called it accurate. But if the experimenters instead asked the subjects to decide whether to share the headline, 51 per cent said they would.

"Most people do not want to spread misinformation," the study's authors wrote. "But the social media context focuses their attention on factors other than truth and accuracy."

In a highly polarised society like today's United States — or, for that matter, India or parts of Europe — those incentives pull heavily toward ingroup solidarity and outgroup derogation. They do not much favor consensus reality or abstract ideals of accuracy.

As people get more prone to misinformation, opportunists and charlatans are also getting better at exploiting this. That can mean tear-it-all-down populists who rise on promises to smash the establishment and control minorities. It can also mean government agencies or freelance hacker groups stirring up social divisions abroad for their benefit. But the roots of the crisis go deeper.

"The problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it's not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone," sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in a much-circulated MIT Technology Review article. "It's like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we're connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one."

In an ecosystem where that sense of identity conflict is all-consuming, she wrote, "belonging is stronger than facts".

Written by: Max Fisher
© 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES