Where I’m going to go here is to talk about a new psychological study that reveals something truly fascinating. However, before we get into it, let’s first start with something rather important.
You can be fooled, I can be fooled, we can all be conned and manipulated.
Why?
Basically because we humans are awash with cognitive biases that can be leveraged.
There have always been deceivers who take full advantage of this reality. There are also honest liars, professionals who will tell you that they are about to trick you, then proceed to do exactly that. We call them illusionists. They do stuff that appears to be mind blowing and supernatural but it is done for entertainment, and they mostly make it very clear that it is just an illusion. It is not hard to conjure up well-known names such as Penn and Teller. It is the darker side of this that we truly do need to be wary about, those that deliberately manipulate and deceive in a way that works because it taps into the cognitive biases we all have.
When it comes to the concept of Fake News, then were do you stand on that?
Like most, as do I, you also believe that you are smarter than “them”, and have a well-tuned BS detector. In most cases you are confident that you can sniff the distant aroma of bovine waste when presented with examples.
You are absolutely sure of this, as I also am.
You look aghast at MAGA buying into and then promoting some utterly absurd stuff, and as you do so, you ponder, “How can they be so stupid“, and so you offer a prayer of thanksgiving to your deity of choice, or for the non-religion, your local library, that you have been blessed with common sense.
Press pause on all this because a new study reveals something utterly fascinating.
You can be manipulated.
Study: When Politics Trumps Truth: Political Concordance Versus Veracity as a Determinant of Believing, Sharing, and Recalling the News
This paper is the result of a study conducted by Geoffrey L. Cohen, Samuel Woolley, Katie Joseff, and Michael Schwalbe.
You can access the full paper here, in the American Psychological Association PsychNet. It is open access, so no paywall (phew!).
What they reveal is a new cognitive bias. They are calling it the “concordance over truth bias“.
The what?
That’s “concordance“, as in your strongly held political beliefs. In other words, what they found is that people with strongly held political beliefs are far more probably sharing news that resonates with those beliefs even when it is false, and also rejecting news that conflicts with those beliefs even if it is true news.
A deeper part of this insight is that those who have the most (undeserved) confidence in their own objectivity regarding “news” are often those that are more prone to being fooled.
Now you might think, “Ah yes, the uneducated Trump Supporters“, or similar.
Nope.
What they discovered is that this bias persisted across education levels, analytic reasoning ability, and even partisan groups. Well OK, I’ll toss you a bone, because they did also discover some evidence of a stronger effect among Trump supporters. Now before you jump up and scream “Of course“, I do feel compelled to point out that it was a bias they also found operating amongst highly educated non-Trump supporters as well.
We often consider the term “Fake News” and so a lot of research has focused on the blatantly fraudulent stuff that gets propagated, but there are two side to that coin. What they also reveal is an insight into the other side of that same coin like this …
Resistance to true news was stronger than susceptibility to fake news.
Let’s explain that using Trump.
There is negative stuff said about Trump that is utterly false. As you can imagine, the Trump supporters will of course reject that. There is also very positive and utterly fake stuff said about Trump, and his supporters just love that.
There is also, with good justification, rather a lot of negative stuff said about Trump that is True. His supporters reject that as fake news. There is also positive stuff said about Trump that is actually true, (Yea I know, that’s hard to imagine, but it can happen), and so his supporters embrace that with relish.
So how do non-Trump supporters handle all this?
Where there are strongly held feeling regarding Trump, and these days that is with godd reason, all the negative stuff about him is embraced, even when it is fake, and all the positive stuff is rejected, even when it is true.
If you are sitting in a media bubble you can end up being very strongly sure you are being wholly objective, and end up being completely wrong about that …
The most robust predictors of the bias were participants’ belief in the relative objectivity of their political side, extreme views about Trump, and the extent of their one-sided media consumption
I should add that this is not a suggestion that you should be consuming Newsmax or Fox to be “impartial” because neither of those sources have any credibility, but rather to be wary of using your emotional feelings as a heuristic to determine what is and is not factual.
The study did also find this …
participants stronger in analytic reasoning, measured with the Cognitive Reflection Task, were more accurate in discerning real from fake headlines when accurate conclusions aligned with their ideology.
They sum it all up like this …
Proponents and opponents of 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump were more influenced by the alignment of news with their political views than by its factual accuracy.
This effect was driven more by resistance to true news than susceptibility to fake news
What they term the “illusion of objectivity” is what is in play here. In other words believing that … “My team is wholly honest and objective, over on the other team they are all liars“… strongly predicted those who where rather ironically the most biased and least objective.
So how did they work all this out?
OK, let’s dig into that a bit.
What did the study actually do?
After carefully selecting a representative sample of participants they presented them a series of news headlines and associated questions.
Participants were advised that this was study on “memory and everyday communications.”. It was done like this with a cover story to conceal what they were actually studying and so ensure no bias came into play.
The survey fed the participants 16 news headlines sequentially in random order, including eight political headlines related to Donald Trump and eight nonpolitical filler headlines. Half the political headlines were positive for Trump (e.g., “Donald Trump ‘Serious Contender’ for Nobel Prize in Economics”), and half were negative for Trump (e.g., “Trump’s Former Accountant: Trump is Not a Billionaire”).
Since they were studying fake news some of the headlines were fake, and some were real.
Some of the fake were clearly fake but not outrageously so … (e.g., Positive: “Free Stay for Veterans at Trump Hotel in Washington, DC,” and Negative: “Trump Said I ‘Don’t Like Poor People’ During Private Meeting with Business Moguls”)
Some of the fake were designed to be outlandishly fake (e.g., Positive: “Trump Beats Grandmaster Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen,” Negative: “Donald Trump Killed Pedestrian While Driving in 1973”)
Who got to see what was random on a 4:1 basis like this …
They then get questioned about these headlines
- Could they recall them?
- Would they be willing to share it on social media?
- etc…
OK, so if you ask this question “What matters more in believing and sharing political news—truth or concordance with our own political views?“, then yes, this played out in a manner that confirmed that truth takes a backseat …
Participants expressed a stronger level of belief and likelihood of sharing fake news aligned with their political views than real news that conflicted with their political views, and this effect held even with our most outlandish fake headlines
As I previously mentioned, they called this the “concordance over truth bias” … where the word “concordance” refers to the stuff, both negative and also positive that aligns with existing political beliefs.
Oh, and there was also this interesting insight …
we hypothesized and found participants to recall fake news headlines more than real ones—a phenomenon that could contribute to the spread of fake news. This result may be due to the novelty of fake news and its ability to evoke emotions such as surprise
Bottom Line
To a surprising degree, politics really does trump truth (Oh come now, how could I possibly not resist that pun)
Contrary to common assumptions, the concordance-over-truth bias was evident across the political spectrum, education levels, and analytical reasoning ability. However, it was less pronounced among individuals who consumed less one-sided media, held less extreme views about Trump—and, most tellingly and paradoxically, among those who acknowledged their own side’s vulnerability to bias.
So what can we do?
Confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias—in combination with one-sided news exposure and the prevalence of misinformation—seem to have given rise to a “post- truth” world.
A key step is to teach people to critically examine not only the news but also their own minds. Otherwise, we risk Carl Sagan’s feared vision of a future where people are “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true”
Our post-truth age is simply a symptom of our own cognitive biases being leveraged by the rise of social media and has revealed that, when left to our own devices, we are digitally illiterate.
You can be fooled, not just by “them”, but also by your own strong emotions.