So much to consider, and most crucially the WHY. Bit more from your
Which Trump lies stick? Republicans believe some falsehoods more than they did six years ago, our poll finds. [...] Biden has frequently argued that Trump is a threat to democracy, citing his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and his open admiration of autocrats. Trump has tried to turn the tables, claiming that Biden is the real threat to democracy. Without evidence, Trump claims Biden is responsible for the myriad criminal cases brought against the former president. About half of Americans say they are “extremely” or “very” worried about threats to democracy in the United States (52 percent), including majorities of Democrats (58 percent) and independents (54 percent) and almost half of Republicans (47 percent). Nearly 6 in 10 of those who strongly approve of Trump (57 percent) are at least very worried about democracy.
[Insert: Those results, though low, are at least better than might be expected with Trump so successful at getting Americans to believe his lies. ]
Americans who say Fox News is one of their main news sources are 13 percentage points more likely to believe the average false Trump claim than the public overall (41 percent versus 28 percent of Americans overall). People who rely on Fox News as a main source of news also are more likely to say Biden won the election because of voter fraud (58 percent to 36 percent among the public overall), whereas a majority of people who rely on all other news sources with sufficient sample sizes, including social media, say Biden won fair and square.
Meanwhile, college graduates are eight percentage points less likely to believe Trump’s false claims than those without college degrees, 23 percent versus 31 percent.
Interestingly, a majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, believe a false claim about the inflation rate — that it has increased for most products over the past 12 months. The annualized consumer price index was 6.4 percent in January 2023, compared to 3.1 percent for January 2024, the last release before the poll was conducted. Yet 72 percent of adults say the inflation rate has increased over the past 12 months, compared to 18 percent who correctly identified that the rate has fallen. Among Democrats, 63 percent say the rate has increased, compared to 85 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of independents.
[Put that down to propaganda and the tendency of so many to see the worst, am guessing.]
Trump’s false statements are central to some of the criminal trials he faces as the presidential election nears, but his advocates have signaled they will claim the truth doesn’t matter. In the case pending in Georgia, where Trump is accused of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, his attorney recently argued that false claims would be protected under the First Amendment. “Falsity alone is not enough,” said Trump’s lawyer, Steve Sadow. “Clearly, being president at the time, dealing with elections and campaigning, calling into question what had occurred — that’s the height of political speech.”
For many of Trump’s supporters, however, his lies aren’t just protected political speech. They are true.
That very last has to be about the most concerning result of the poll. For one why should the sorts on lies Trump is guilty of be seen as protected political speech. None should be. For two, that so many see lies as true instead of not being sure is a problem.
One fair qualification comes to mind, that toomany people would guess at questions like the inflation one, so some of the stats if respondents were given a chance to check out some they weren't sure about, could well be arguable.
TO THE WHY -- Why do our brains believe lies?
Correcting lies and misinformation is difficult because learning the truth doesn’t delete them from our memory
By Richard Sima November 3, 2022 at 6:02 a.m. EDT
(George Wylesol for The Washington Post)
It’s been an election cycle packed with misinformation and conspiracy theories. So why do so many people believe the lies?
Blame the brain.
Many of the decisions we make as individuals and as a society depend on accurate information; however, our psychological biases .. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-021-00006-y .. and predispositions make us vulnerable to falsehoods.
As a result, misinformation is more likely to be believed, remembered and later recalled — even after we learn that it was false.
“On every level, I think that misinformation has the upper hand,” said Nathan Walter .. https://communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/nathan-walter.html , a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University who studies the correction of misinformation.
Why we fall for misinformation
No one is completely immune to falsehoods, in part because of how our cognition is built and how misinformation exploits it.
[Insert: We all have a pretty good idea of what cognition means, still doesn't hurt to see it again .. it's basically just how we learn .. "Cognition is defined as ‘the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.’" https://cambridgecognition.com/what-is-cognition/
We use mental shortcuts, or heuristics, to make many of our judgments, which benefit us. But our cognitive tendencies can make us susceptible to misinformation if we are not careful.
“By default, people will believe anything they see or hear,” said Stephan Lewandowsky .. https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/stephan-lewandowsky , a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol who specializes in understanding how people respond to corrections of misinformation. In our day-to-day lives, “that makes a lot of sense because most things that we’re exposed to are true,” he said.
[This we know is what liars as Trump and media misinformation mongers as Fox News understand well:]
At the same time, the more we see something repeated, the more likely we are to believe it to be true. This “illusory truth effect” arises because we use familiarity and ease of understanding as a shorthand for truth; the more something is repeated, the more familiar and fluent it feels whether it is misinformation or fact.
“There is only typically one true version of a claim and an infinite number of ways you could falsify it, right?” said Nadia Brashier .. https://www.nadiabrashier.com/ .. a psychology professor at Purdue University who studies why people fall for fake news and misinformation. “So, if you hear something over and over again, probabilistically, it’s going to be the true thing.”
But these shortcuts do not work so well in our current political environment and social media, which can repeat and amplify falsehoods. One study found that even a single exposure .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6279465/ .. to a fake headline made it seem truer. Politicians often repeat lies and seem to be aware of the power of the illusory truth effect, Brashier said.
[That's where it really sucks. Every individual should have a commitment to truth regardless of how a lie could benefit one individually. Qualification, of course, is that lies like saying you feel well when you actually don't are ok depending on circumstance, but lies like the election was stolen when all the evidence says that's a lie are inexcusable. Unforgivable.]
We are also more susceptible to misinformation that fits into our worldviews or social identities, and we can fall into confirmation bias, which is the tendency to look for and favor information fitting what we already believe.
False stories and emotionally driven examples are easier to understand and more immersive than statistics. “We are navigating this new world of numbers and probabilities and risk factors,” Walter said. “But the vessel that we use, our brain, is very old.”
Why misinformation resists correction
Once we have heard misinformation, it is hard to uproot even when we want to know the truth. Multiple studies have found that misinformation can still influence our thinking even if we receive a correction and believe it to be true, a phenomenon known as the “continued influence effect.”
In a meta-analysis aggregating the results from 32 studies of over 6,500 people, Walter found that correcting falsehoods .. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093650219854600 .. reduces but does not entirely eliminate the effect of misinformation.
One of the biggest barriers to correcting misinformation is the fact that hearing the truth doesn’t delete a falsehood from our memory.
Instead, the falsehood and its correction coexist and compete to be remembered. Brain imaging studies conducted by Lewandowsky and his colleagues found evidence that our brains store .. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811919301879 .. both the original piece of misinformation as well as its correction.
“It seems to be cognitively almost impossible to listen to something, understand it and, at the same time, not believe it,” Lewandowsky said.
Dismissing misinformation requires a whole extra cognitive step of tagging it as false in our memory. “But by that time, in a sense, it’s too late, because it’s already in your memory,” Lewandowsky said.
Over time, our memory of the fact-check may fade, leaving us only with the misinformation.
There is evidence that “we’re running up against basic limitations of human memory when we’re giving people corrective information,” Brashier said.
Finally, correcting misinformation is even more challenging if it is embedded into our identity or system of belief. People build mental models of the world to make sense of unfolding situations and “it’s very difficult to rip out a plank of this edifice without the whole thing collapsing,” Lewandowsky said. “If it is an important component of your mental model, it is cognitively very difficult to just yank it out and say it’s false.”
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How to inoculate the brain from misinformation
There is so much misinformation out there that it is not feasible to react to each new falsehood that arises. “It’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole. You can be very good, but at the end, the mole always wins,” Walter said.
Debunking .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/05/debunk-political-misinformation-advice/?itid=lk_inline_manual_41 .. alone is not enough to combat misinformation — we also need to be proactive by “prebunking,” which essentially means preparing our brain to recognize misinformation before we encounter it. Much like the way a vaccine primes your immune system to battle a foreign invader, prebunking can inoculate and strengthen your psychological immune system against viral misinformation.
In one study from this year, Lewandowsky and colleagues presented almost 30,000 people across seven experiments with five short videos .. https://inoculation.science/inoculation-videos/incoherence/ .. about common manipulation techniques — incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, ad hominem attacks and emotionally manipulative language. Each video provided a warning about the impending misinformation attack and manipulation technique before presenting a “microdose” of misinformation.
Another way to protect yourself is to simply pay attention to whether what you are seeing is accurate. When people scroll through their social media feeds, they aren’t always thinking about accuracy. One recent study .. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03344-2 .. found that subtly nudging people to consider whether what they see is accurate made them less likely to share misinformation.
“All of us can fall for misinformation,” Brashier said. “I’ve fallen for false stories myself even though this is what I study.”
Do you have a question about human behavior or neuroscience? Email BrainMatters@washpost.com .. brainmatters@washpost.com .. and we may answer it in a future column.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. While, tragically, there are almost too many victims to tally from this criminal act of America’s making, the notion of truth must certainly count as primary among them.
We must not forget how the George W Bush administration manipulated the facts, the media and the public after the horrific attacks of 9/11, hellbent as the administration was to go to war in Iraq. By 2.40pm on 11 September 2001, mere hours after the attacks, Donald Rumsfeld, the then secretary of defense, was already sending a memo to the joint chiefs of staff to find evidence .. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/index.htm .. that would justify attacking the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (as well as Osama bin Laden).
Insert: Just as Trump asked Georgia to find the votes
Days later, on 14 September, President Bush had his first post-9/11 phone call with Tony Blair, the UK prime minister. According to Bruce Riedel, who was present at the call as a member of Bush’s national security council, Bush told Blair about his plans to “hit” Iraq soon. “Blair was audibly taken aback,” Riedel remembers .. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/09/17/9-11-and-iraq-the-making-of-a-tragedy/ . “He pressed Bush for evidence of Iraq’s connection to the 9/11 attack and to al-Qaida. Of course, there was none, which British intelligence knew.”
American intelligence also knew there was no connection, but that didn’t stop the administration
This was a confession extracted under torture, and therefore – as the Senate select committee on intelligence’s 2014 “Torture Report” points out – fundamentally unreliable. Al-Libi later recanted his statement, the report explained, saying that he had simply told his torturers “what he assessed they wanted to hear”, Regardless, the information, which US intelligence believed was false on its face .. https://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/10/iraq.intel/, made its way into Colin Powell’s speech before the UN security council in February 2003.
In other words, it was all lies, lies and more lies. In the two years following 9/11, Bush and his top officials publicly uttered at least 935 lies about the threat that Saddam posed to the United States, according to the Center for Public Integrity. In the run-up to war, Bush & associates flooded the airwaves with the talking point “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” so often that it began to sound like a jingle from a cheap law firm commercial. Needless to say, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.
Bush succeeded at the time because the public, primed to be afraid, was susceptible to his lies and the American media was pliable. The New York Times, as the nation’s leading newspaper, played a key role in disseminating the administration’s lies with, well, let’s call it questionable professionalism.
By 2004, the paper was issuing its own mea culpa .. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html , admitting it had misled readers about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and more, because accounts by anti-Saddam exiles “were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq”.
In all its agonized self-reflection, the Times’ editorial somehow managed to blame foreign exiles above the US government or even the Times. “Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources,” the editorial said. “So did many news organizations – in particular, this one.”
This, you might say, is old news. Why should it matter today?For one thing, the US-led invasion not only destroyed Iraq, but it displaced some 9 million people, killed at least 300,000 civilians by direct violence, and devastated Iraq’s already precarious environment. Over 4,400 Americans were also killed and close to 32,000 have been wounded in action in Iraq alone.
The invasion also destabilized the region and is certainly a leading cause for today’s global migration crisis. Brown University’s Costs of War project notes that the number of people displaced by all of the US’s post-9/11 wars, at least 38 million people, “exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II”.
The Iraq war ushered in a style of politics where truth is, at best, an inconvenience. Long before Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway stood on the White House lawn in 2017 and told NBC’s Chuck Todd about “alternative facts”, far prior to Donald Trump exploiting the term “fake news .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/17/trump-fake-news-awards-winners ”, and much before a current lawsuit revealed the nefarious coordination of a rightwing media empire and a lying government, we were already living in a post-truth world, one created in part by an established media willing and able to amplify government lies.
Of course, politicians have been proffering lies from the moment lies were invented. (Which was probably when politicians were also invented.) And Bush is hardly the first US president to march the country into war based on a lie. Goaded on by the media baron William Randolph Hearst, William McKinley led the US into the Spanish-American war on a lie .. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2008/february/truth-about-tonkin . The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which ushered the US fully into Vietnam, was almost certainly a lie.
But the difference, with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, was how the apparatus of lying became institutionalized in our government and abetted by our media: if you don’t like the information that your own intelligence agencies are providing, simply create your own agency, the office of special plans .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans . By the time Bush left office, US troops may have begun to leave Iraq’s major cities, but the larger “war on terror” had truly become a way of life.
The world is still reeling from the consequences of these lies and the institutions built on them. In the US, they continue to corrode our politics. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars are overrepresented in far-right movements in this country. Public trust in government is near an all-time low, having fallen precipitously during the Bush years. And social media companies have taken up the mantle of amplifying the lies our politicians tell.
Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq, the misbegotten war continues to degrade our national political life. This may be a hard reality to confront, but it’s also the truth.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
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