The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

Whatever one thinks about the merits of Trump’s election, or of the UK’s exit from the EU (“Brexit”), it is profoundly troubling to think that these momentous political events were underwritten by falsehoods. And it raises a deep and unsettling question: Can democracy survive in an age of fake news?

To understand why false beliefs persist and spread, we need to understand where beliefs come from in the first place.

Many of our beliefs—perhaps most of them—have a more complex origin: we form them on the basis of what other people tell us. We trust and learn from one another.

The ability to share information and influence one another’s beliefs is part of what makes humans special. It allows for science and art—indeed, culture of any sort. But it leads to a conundrum. How do we know whether to trust what people tell us?

Most of us get our false beliefs from the same places we get our true ones, and if we want the good stuff, we risk getting the bad as well.

we need to understand the social character of belief—and recognize that widespread falsehood is a necessary, but harmful, corollary to our most powerful tools for learning truths.

if we want to develop successful scientific theories to help us anticipate the consequences of our choices, mistrusting those with different beliefs is toxic. It can create polarized camps that fail to listen to the real, trustworthy evidence coming from the opposite side. In general, it means that a smaller proportion of the community ultimately arrives at true beliefs.

While conformity seems to vary across cultures and over time, it reflects two truths about human psychology: we do not like to disagree with others, and we often trust the judgments of others over our own.

As Oreskes and Conway document in Merchants of Doubt, the key idea behind the revolutionary new strategy—which they call the “Tobacco Strategy”—was that the best way to fight science was with more science.

Many of the methods of modern propaganda were developed by the United States during World War I. From April 1917 until August 1919, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) conducted a systematic campaign to sell US participation in the war to the American public.17 The CPI produced films, posters, and printed publications, and it had offices in ten countries, including the United States. In some cases it fed newspapers outright lies about American activities in Europe—and occasionally got caught, leading the New York Times to run an editorial calling it the Committee on Public Misinformation. One member of the group later described its activities as “psychological warfare.”

After the war, the weapons of psychological warfare were turned on US and Western European consumers. In a series of books in the 1920s, including Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), CPI veteran Edward Bernays synthesized results from the social sciences and psychology to develop a general theory of mass manipulation of public opinion—for political purposes, but also for commerce.

“those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”