Why we're powerless against fake news.
On our minds: Lies, and why we love them. |
Human Frailty, Impeachment Edition |
 | | From left: The constitutional scholars Noah Feldman, Pamela S. Karlan, Michael J. Gerhardt and Jonathan Turley on Day 1 of the House Judiciary Committee hearings, in what felt like a detailed recap of the main event. Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times |
|
Impeachment hearings continued this week, with multiple constitutional scholars testifying about whether President Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine into opening a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden in order to benefit Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign rises to the level of an impeachable offense. (Most said yes, with one scholar testifying that he believes more evidence is needed.) |
Ukraine never actually opened the investigation. But let’s imagine, for a moment, that it did. Would it have hurt Joe Biden’s presidential chances, as President Trump is alleged to have believed it would? |
After all, the allegations against Mr. Biden’s son Hunter have already been conclusively debunked by numerous trusted mainstream media outlets. Would any investigation have seemed like an obvious sham, and therefore had little effect on the U.S. election anyway? |
Well, no. Social science suggests that humans are simply too flawed and weak as a species for that to be the likely outcome. (How’s that for some holiday cheer from your friendly neighborhood Interpreters? Human frailty and a paaaaar-triiiidge in a pear tree.) |
The illusory truth effect, a long-observed quirk of human psychology, means that when people hear a false statement multiple times, they perceive it as true, even if they are told it is false. That problem has become much more severe in the age of social media, because viral sharing online has made it easier than ever for people to be exposed to the same false idea over and over. |
So a big, splashy story like an investigation into a major candidate’s son, even if coverage included constant reminders that it had no factual basis, would probably lead many people to believe that Hunter Biden had been up to no good. |
And even if people did believe that the allegations were false, a 2018 study by Daniel Effron, a professor at London Business School who studies morality and ethics, found that we tend to be less judgmental of falsehoods that suit our political biases. |
“When judging a falsehood that makes a favored politician look good, we are willing to ask, ‘Could it have been true?’ and then weaken our condemnation if we can imagine the answer is yes,” Mr. Effron wrote in a 2018 Times Op-Ed. |
That means that people are less opposed to sharing such false stories — with the result that they will be more likely to go viral, and more likely to convince others via the illusory truth effect. |
That makes us a little worried the impeachment proceedings themselves, by frequently referring to Mr. Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to open the investigation, might be unwittingly reinforcing people’s belief in the underlying allegations against Mr. Biden. (And … that this newsletter might arguably be doing so as well. But we hope, perhaps over-optimistically, that by calling attention to these phenomena our readers will be more able to resist their effects.) |
If you are a researcher and have some data on how impeachment coverage is affecting the public’s views of the debunked allegations against Mr. Biden, please send it along. |
- “The Last Whalers”: Doug Bock Clark’s book about the Lamalerans, a tribe of 1,500 people on a remote island in Indonesia who are some of the last in the world to survive from subsistence whale hunting, is a beautifully written account of how technology and modernity can change the most fundamental aspects of human relationships and society.
- “He’s a liar, a con artist and a snitch. His testimony could soon send a man to his death”: The great Pamela Colloff writes about one of the most prolific jailhouse informants in America.
- Women pay a higher price for power: A new paper by Sandra Hakansson, a Ph.D. candidate at Uppsala University in Sweden, finds that perpetrators of political violence are much more likely to target women, making politics a more dangerous job for them than for their male colleagues.
|
歡迎蒞臨：https://ofa588.com/
娛樂推薦：https://www.ofa86.com/
沒有留言:
張貼留言