343 - Misguided - Matthew Facciani

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Misinformation and Bias

1:19You can go to kitted, K-I-T-T-E-D dot shop and use the code SMART50, S-M-A-R-T-5-0 at checkout, and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out, middle of the show. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. Episode 343. The classic example is like someone who is very convinced they are unbiased.

1:49But that thought process of really stridently thinking you're unbiased, ironically makes you more biased because you're not open to the idea that you could be wrong. So you're just following this very narrow track in your mind that allows you to believe various falsehoods even though you think you're not. That was the voice of Matthew Facciani, who is a doctor of sociology, a sociologist and an interdisciplinary social scientist,

2:19which means he researches neuroscience, psychology, and sociology, and then mushes them all together to help make sense of the world. His focus these days, his specialty, is media literacy, which means he studies misinformation and polarization and how nefarious actors manipulate all of us on purpose to get us to think, feel, and do things they would like us to think, feel, and do. He studies all of that and then comes up with ways to better combat all

2:53of that and teaches it to people in the form of media literacy. He has a podcast called Misguided and he just released a new book titled Misguided, which is all about misinformation, where it starts, how it spreads, and what to do about it. And that title, it's important here, Misguided. Because as Facciani explains, the research is clear, the evidence is overwhelming, that people who fall for fake news, people who share misinformation, who believe it, people who just believe things that to

3:29other people seem clearly false. These people are not stupid. They're not crazy. For the most part, they have been misguided. And as Facciani's research reveals and his book explains, there are a lot of nefarious actors out there, organizations and individuals, political institutions, corporate entities, and so on, that count on this. They understand how people actually work and they use that understanding to purposefully generate misinformation. And these nefarious actors, they produce such misinformation a lot.

4:02That way, you get exposed to it repeatedly, all in an attempt to misguide you toward the assumptions, conclusions, and behaviors they would like you to assume, conclude, and engage in. We will talk about all of that in just a moment. We'll get into things like superordinate identities and affect control theory. What we can do about all of this? Is the train headed for the cliff? Or can we actually create an environment where there's a whole lot less misinformation or just inoculate ourselves against it?

4:40All these things are coming up soon. But first, I wanted to take a second to define just what is misinformation, scientifically speaking. According to the American Psychological Association, misinformation is, quite simply, false or inaccurate information, while disinformation is false information, which is deliberately intended to mislead. As Facciani explains in his book, Misguided, Misinformation includes both intentionally and unintentionally false information. It's put out there on purpose, or it just so happens to be not true.

5:13So, if you have a belief based on such inaccurate information, that would be considered a misperception. And as he puts it, if someone were to say, believe that walking backward cures the common cold, that would be a misperception. That's a belief that is not supported by the evidence. That's someone who, for some reason, is misinformed, which is not the same as being uninformed. An uninformed person wouldn't have any beliefs about how to cure the common cold at all.

5:47They're just absent of beliefs in this regard. In this framework, misinformation is, therefore, a big umbrella term under which there are many kinds of misinformation. So, for instance, disinformation in this framework would be intentionally false or misleading information. That means the person or people who spread disinformation want the people who are exposed to the misinformation they spread to believe it. And they want them to believe it because they have some goal in mind toward which the

6:21belief in things the spreaders know are false serves some purpose. Propaganda, in this framework, is a form of disinformation. Usually, propaganda is used to change attitudes via changing beliefs, via misinformation. So, if you want to shift public opinion from negative to positive, or positive to negative, you can do so by identifying an area in which people may be uninformed. Then you can misinform them, and then once they are misinformed, they will, on their own, generate positive or negative

6:56emotional reactions to the issue for which their false beliefs now provide them with an inaccurate model about some concept or event or institution or person or political party or so on. For instance, someone who does not live in a major metropolitan area who has never visited one, they might be uninformed about the rate of crime in major cities. The truth might be that crime rates have been going down

7:26for a long time and are currently at a 50-year low, but they don't know that. So, a nefarious actor might spread disinformation about high crime rates in major cities for the sake of misinforming the uninformed. And now the misinformed will generate negative attitudes about the safety and overall civic health of cities they've never visited in person. You can then manipulate people's deeper beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors by suggesting actions, laws, and blame that

7:59those attitudes will now support. And that's not just some hypothetical, this is how it works. No, this has been done a lot. There is a long history of propaganda throughout all of civilization, especially during sort of the radio into television era where it became much easier to spread that sort of thing and get a lot more bang for your buck. Propaganda. It's a thing that happens, still happens, right now.

8:30It's happening today. It's happening wherever there is a device where you can look at things that tell you how things might be working around you. It's a real thing. And there's a wide array of this sort of stuff. There's another kind of misinformation that's rarely mentioned. In the literature, they call it mid-information. And that's when no one really knows exactly what the truth is yet, either concerning a science fact or a

9:01historical incident or some sort of evolving situation. As Facciani points out, this was the case during the Middle Ages before the development of germ theory. Back then, most medical experts believed miasma or bad air was the true cause of the bubonic plague. What they didn't know was that it was actually being spread through direct contact with individuals. So in this case, it wasn't what they didn't know that got them in trouble so much as what they

9:34thought they knew for sure. Because they took actions to avoid bad air all the time. But they did not take measures to avoid direct contact. So this has been with us forever. Misinformation in some form or another is part of the human experience. It's been part of our information exchange for a long, long time. It's just now, the information economy is much more complex. And misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and so on, it's much easier to spread and share at scale.

10:07And if that bothers you, you are not alone. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 70% of people polled across 19 countries said the spread of false information online is a, quote, major threat. When polling people just inside the United States, 84% of people said they believed misinformation was a, quote, very big problem today. But here's the thing. The fallout and impact of misinformation, it's not inevitable. We actually understand scientifically how all of this works and we understand it quite well.

10:41We have been researching this for a long while and we know how to fight against it. And that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. That is what we're going to discuss with sociologist Matthew Facciani right after this commercial break. I chose the bachelor's program at Walden University because I wanted a college that was going to work just as hard as I do. They helped me explore career options and develop the skills I needed to go after what

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15:11a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of this out at kitted.shop or just click the link in the show notes. And now, we return to our program. My name is David McCraney. This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast. And our guest in this episode is sociologist Matthew Facciani. And who is that? Matthew will tell you. So, I am a social scientist who studies why people believe the things that they do. I've been working at the University of Notre Dame for the last few years in their

15:47computer science department where we've been studying how to teach media and digital literacy in a way that's scalable and engaging. You wrote a book about all of this and I think the title is important. Misguided is a good term that I will use and I will cite you when I use it because what I often see in discourse about all this is to assume that the people who are behaving in ways that you disagree with or they believe things you disagree with that they're stupid or that they are rude or that

16:23they have been tricked because because they're stupid and rude and the framing of they've been misguided is a different frame when you get down into the scalpel version of this. So, let me ask that as a question. Are people who fall for misinformation Matt, the expert on this topic, are people who fall for misinformation stupid? No. To give a yes-no answer, I would say no because there's so many intelligent people that fall for misinformation. It kind of goes against that idea and my whole point is that

16:58we're all vulnerable to this process because we're social creatures, we're motivated by these social motivations to belong in our groups and to have community and I start out the book and often use this example outside my book with the idea of flat earthers and how there was this really great documentary behind the curve that came out a few years ago that really dives into this very beautifully. They talk about the community and the social aspects of people who believe the earth is flat and how there's

17:32conferences and friendships that develop and this community around that and I think that's so critical to understand the community component because it provides us with so much self-esteem and makes us feel supported within ourselves. So I think when we think about why someone might believe something false, even something as extreme as the earth being flat, that belief by itself may not have a big impact or any impact on their day-to-day life. So whether the earth is hexagon or square or spherical, it's really not changing their day-to-day life.

18:07But what definitely impacts their day-to-day life is if they lose all their friends and people they care about and their community. So from that perspective, it's actually pretty rational to uphold this belief and say, I'm going to continue believing what my friends and close connections believe because I want to maintain that community and these people care about me, I care about them and this belief is part of a larger set of beliefs that kind of holds

18:37us together and we can connect with each other. So to me, it is very rational from a psychological perspective to maintain a variety of beliefs, some of which may be false. And that speaks to my larger point about the book Misguided. Misguided is something that happens to all of us. It's a process of being guided by social forces beliefs that provide us with self esteem and meaning and reductions of uncertainty. So we have this strong motivation to protect our identities and our groups that provide us with this meaning and

19:12self esteem. So a lot of times it can be very positive. We're guided towards being a good parent because we care about our children. Like that's an identity process. Or, you know, we want to do well on our sports team because we care about the sports team that we belong to. But when we belong to a political team, for example, sometimes that support of that political identity and that support of the political team might mean rejecting certain facts that make the

19:44political team look bad. And that's where we run into these issues with people having this motivation to protect that identity so strongly that they will reject information and believe falsehoods sometimes. So that's kind of like the larger issue of identities and then it gets more complicated as you dive into like the context to which these identity forces are most impactful. And we'll get into that in a second but I just I love how surprising this can seem to be

20:15uninitiated because you're doing it all day every day and we've been doing it all day every day for the entirety of human civilization. Right. Yeah. And yet this can still seem quite surprising. Yeah, I've I felt I felt similarly. I mean, you know, I study this stuff every day so like I know other people who don't maybe don't think about it as much and it could be a lot more novel. But I think it's even broader and deeper than that because whenever you're learning about these social biases that okay,

20:50we have this motivation to protect important identities and we have this motivation to protect identities and meanings that bond us with our communities. What the broader message is that we're actually motivated by these forces that we're not always aware of or thinking about and human beings like to believe that we're very rational and logical and we're making decisions completely by logic and reason and we're just in control driving how we believe things and how we come

21:20to different conclusions. But the reality is much more complex and that we have a lot less control than we might think and we might be very biased by our environments and the social and psychological forces behind that. So I think some of that requires awareness and this broader intellectual humility that yes, we can be biased and yes, there are forces that we might not even know about. And appreciating that makes us less biased. So it's kind of interesting whenever someone is trying to say like, no,

21:54you know, I know the classic example is like someone who is very convinced they are unbiased. But that thought process of really stridently thinking you're unbiased ironically makes you more biased because you're not open to the idea that you could be wrong. So you're just following this very narrow track in your mind that allows you to believe various falsehoods even though you think you're not. What comes up a lot in these discussions I find is the information deficit model is what comes up because

22:26it just seems like if you just saw the things I saw, if you just been exposed especially in academia, if you just exposed the information that I've been exposed to and just acknowledge that I am an expert on this topic and so therefore take a look at this information that I have provided for you then you'll look at that and go, oh okay, I was wrong about that. It seems to me there's an element of this group is trusting one source of information and this group is

23:00trusting a different source of information. As a question, what would you suppose is the difference between a person who believes the earth is round and a person who believes there's this flat when it comes to who they're trusting? What's altering that different trust bases? Trust is such a critical component and it's also another very social type of thing here because it's comprised of how you feel about the person and how competent you think they are. It's interesting to think about trust in the form of experts because so much of how we determine if someone's

23:36trustworthy or not is not just a very technical aspect of how competent they are at certain problem solving. It's not like we're just viewing all their test scores or something and saying, okay, this person's competent or not. A huge chunk of trust is warmth. How do you believe that this person has your best interests in mind? And that component is a huge predictor of whether or not we trust someone. So if you don't know any scientists personally or any physicians personally, then you might have less interaction with them

24:11and it might be more easy to believe that they're not having your best interests in mind and they might be corrupted somehow. So as far as the flat earth thing, it's like, okay, imagine you have this contrarian, free thinker, influencer that you like to follow who is always in your phone, in your hand every day talking to you directly, sometimes responding to your comments and you have this connection with them. It might be a parasocial connection but it's still a social connection with this person and you believe that they

24:46have your best interests in mind, they're constantly affirming identities and questions that you have, so you trust them and they might think that the earth is flat or they're presenting that view to you and maybe they're showing some of their work in a technical looking way and you trust that because of the social connection you have with them and you can compare that to this faceless abstract scientific institution that releases a statement on their website and says you know the earth is round. Well like from a psychological perspective, which one of those pieces of information

25:23are you more likely to trust? The person that you have this ongoing social contract with or this faceless abstract non-human entity of just this like big science group that you know you're supposed to distrust and I think that really speaks to how we form trust and then what that looks like in practice and how a lot of these institutions have been super slow to adapt to the current media landscape and have been so cautious to have dialogue with people that now we're seeing the negative effects of that where we need people like going on podcasts

25:59and having dialogue with people on social media from these institutions whether it's academic institutions or medical institutions, science institutions, because people want to see that level of sociality, that social relationship and if you don't have that then you're already being reduced so much in the components that determine if you're trustworthy and it creates a vacuum for someone else to come and be like hey that person's not even talking to you or when they do talk to you it's a very patronizing like top-down type of process so instead trust me and I will talk to you

26:34and I'll give you access and you know answer all your questions directly so you were seeing that asymmetry between these institutions that didn't value science outreach enough and all of these influencers who are all about outreach and connecting with their communities how that asymmetry and trust can form from that perspective. You talk about this in the book like there's a question of how much of this has always been the case and how much of this is new especially when it comes to the polarization and you know you go

27:07from there's a maniac in the street yelling crazy things in your small village and you know that person and everybody knows who that is and then you switches to every maniac that has access to the internet you're now yelling and it alters like the signal to noise ratio and what goes to the top and then you've got newspapers and radio then television then internet every single one of those changes the information economy and the attention economy and the and then what gets incentivized and what everybody's consciously or unconsciously a b testing all of that and

27:42going with what works especially if you make a living off of it cable news started having you know punditry that was just angry is the from my perspective it's like accuracy was never what was connecting to the person it was that they were angry at the same things you were angry about exactly and that's the issue that's at stake that's what's actually the motivation even when you're arguing with your family member like you're what you want them to do is come over to your side so it's no longer an us versus them situation and the

28:17actual topic is almost irrelevant that you just i just want you on my side right so that you're motivated by the same things i'm motivated by and you're angry at the same things i'm angry about and then the landscape just adapted to it so that's what you do up front is portray your anger and portray your us versus themness and everything sorts that seems newer or at least the how quickly the economy can adapt to that is faster and now i think i'm on the right track there right yeah absolutely i think the psychological biases

28:52that we've been talking about have been around since humans have been around but what is different now is the speed and the scalability of enacting those biases i mean social media makes it instant whereas before you'd have to have like a group of people actually meet them in person and have conversations and it gets really messy and i think that's kind of another interesting distinction of before whenever you would try to bring up politics or something like you might if you were embedded within your local community and you were like going to community events and

29:27interacting with lots of different people there was you knew you had to have future encounters with these people so you had to treat them with respect and you know mutual respect and understand that they're full humans with their complex ideas just like you but with the age of the internet and social media you can self-select people who think almost exactly like you and affirm your identities and your ideologies and make the world much cleaner and like these are all the good guys on my side who agree with me 100% and everyone else who's disagreeing with

30:03me is on the bad side and it just makes it so simple and so quick and algorithms amplify that and keep showing you stuff that you like and you interact with and AI makes that even more personalized like we're just like streamlining these psychological biases to make them more impactful so it's not so much that like social media itself is creating polarization it's just making these existing social psychological biases much easier to be introduced to us and then amplified and reinforced as we interact with them I think this is one of the things that is

30:38most difficult for like a especially United States culture but just Western culture in general you want to think that people are being misled and they're being tricked and the battle is like to fight the agents who are brainwashing people and there's a little less emphasis on a person is actively choosing to engage or disengage with certain sources and information and the idea there would be any responsibility involved is a prickly thing to introduce to the conversation for a lot of people I wonder what your thoughts are on that yeah I mean it's an interesting yeah

31:14I think both this is something that like both sides of the political spectrum will say it's like the other side is just brainwashed they're NPCs or whatever and I think that's that's an interesting idea of itself because like what does that say about how you view other people like you do view other people as just these easy to lead and mislead people but like you're not part of that so it's like you're like very much othering this group of people that it's like you're assuming they have completely different psychological processes than you do and that's

31:49just not true like we're all human beings we all have these social psychological biases again that's like my main point is like we all have these and we're all vulnerable to it and it's important to understand what contexts and what situations make these biases more impactful so yeah I think it's a it's an easy way to just ascribe a simple explanation to something especially if we don't like the outcome it kind of goes into like you know just world hypothesis stuff and and thinking about like neat simple solutions of well you know my dad I

32:25want to believe my dad is good and what he's believing is something I consider not good so there must be this external thing that's that's driving that and instead of like under diving into the complex interplay of of environment and social influence and how we all have these biases I'm just reiterating things in a way but I find that to be I one of the things I most knee-jerk response to is this othering that you're describing the because there's just so much research into well people will actively avoid certain types of information you do that

33:00enough and the but it was just newspapers or books there's that's one there's some sort of impact there but when it's as you're describing it constant from the almost if you especially if you wake up and you begin doom scrolling within you know 30 seconds of entering conscious reality again like like yeah you're doing a lot of work to stay inside your bubble right a lot of people are helping you do that more and more and almost making it as easy as ordering room service but it's you know it's a the effort you have to

33:36put into doing the thing that you're going to do they're making it so easy to get from here to there okay I can talk about that forever and I'll burn all our time talking about that because I find that particularly fascinating right now identity that that's a word that we that is in the common parlance but an actual social scientist a cognitive researcher has a much more robust understanding of the term identity so let's just start there what from the from a scientific perspective what do we talk about when we talk about identity yeah great

34:13question so from a social science perspective how I can go other people have different identity or different definitions of identity so that's a whole other conversation of like the nuance there but broadly speaking from a social psychological perspective and identity is defined as a set of meanings that allow us to identify with a role or a social group or a unique characteristic that defines us as a like a unique person so the set of meanings is

34:43really how we're thinking about it so what does that mean and like how do we define those meanings and how do we measure them you know we can ask people we can try to track how they interact with different things but really thinking about identities as meanings and values that we want to adhere to and why that matters is because once we know that there's these important identities and then associated with these important values and meanings

35:14we then know that people have this motivation to protect those identities by acting in ways that are consistent with those meanings and values and when people act in ways that are consistent with these meanings and values it provides them a source of self-esteem so there's this constant motivation to maintain consistencies between the behaviors that we do the information that we process and the meanings and the values associated with those important identities because they provide us with

35:44this feedback loop of self-esteem so for example let's say you're a student and you care about being a good student that's an important identity for you there's roles associated with that identity such as studying and going to class and whenever you're studying and going to class and then you're getting good grades that provides you a self-esteem boost because you care about that and it it allows you to verify that identity in your mind in a way

36:15that keeps giving you this positive feedback loop so you want to keep studying getting good grades being a good student and so on and so forth so that's the like the positive aspects of identities and not only do we have this this feedback loop with self-esteem identities also allow us to connect with other people who share characteristics with us so we can form bonds and provide all the social support and communities so there's all these positives

36:45that go along with identities like this constant verification of the meanings and the values of these identities make us feel good so we're constantly motivated to do that but as we've been describing whenever we have this motivation to protect those identities and act in ways that are consistent with those meanings sometimes it means rejecting facts and rejecting reality in a way that's adhering to these falsehoods because what matters more is protecting those identities protecting that source

37:16of self-esteem and protecting the communities associated with those identities we belong to and that's where we see issues of vulnerability to misinformation we like to think of our identity as something that just is that was this is why I I I I either was born with this identity or I chose it from the panoply of options the fact that I was influenced to consider this identity important to me is something we get prickly about because it's

37:46feels like I have no agency involved agency is a key word there and I think that's that's one of the challenges with having these types of conversations is we have to acknowledge that we have less agency than we might think and that's an uncomfortable truth to try to present with people you know talk about like a meta discussion of identity yeah it feels like it's synonymous with agency but it's not right yeah it's a psychological process like we're measuring psychological bias in the form of social influence influence through identities and when we have these identities

38:23they do happen sometimes randomly you know like like college is a good example because like you're meeting lots of different people and like you're kind of growing up and becoming who you are and that could your identities could be formed by just who you interact with who you have class with like if you're just walking through campus and this kid comes up to you and he's like hey you want to join my club and let's say it's a religious club and he seems really nice and then you become religious ultimately because of that interaction or

39:00maybe you become non-religious if it's like an atheist club so it's like you might not even think that that was the thing that pushed you but what do you think of like the preponderance of your social interactions we're motivated again to be these social creatures and have social support from people we care about and that can be due to who we connect with and that can be a very random process that you know we don't always like to think about which is in itself we may have we could have been born into a culture that

39:36was more okay with that yeah it's got us so quickly yeah it's just my favorite thing and we can have many many identities as you talk about in the book the you can be a parent and a teacher and a musician and ex-military and American and from Iowa and a fan of this and you like that this and I go to this conference and this convention and I like this TV show the all these things are multiple aspects most identities that can become depending on the context and being on the other people that share it

40:12will have more impact on your cognition and behavior because it sort of rises in the importance of that context that identity is front and center tell me a little bit until everybody in the world a little bit about the difference between identity salience and identity prominence yeah so identity prominence is referring to how personally important the identity is to you and identity salience is more about if it's top of mind or not so if something is a salient you're thinking about it if something is prominent it's more of a deeper personal association with that identity

40:48and both of those influence our behavior because if we're reminded about an identity we have so it's more salient we're also more likely to want to support that identity and act in ways consistent with that identity but if with if it's an important identity a prominent identity we're also motivated to support it and these are constantly changing what's top of mind for us is a constant process of like if you remind someone about their identity then they may be more likely to think about it and then have a motivation to protect it so one of

41:25the studies that i mentioned that kind of dives into this is this political identity study where if you have people write about their political identities they become more biased and that's because they're thinking about it more and they're like oh yeah you know i'm a conservative or i'm a liberal and now that i'm thinking about this i'm going to respond to even having stronger political attitudes than the group of people in the study that you don't ask to think about your political identity so it's becoming more salient in their mind it's more top of mind

42:01and it was already important to them for for many of that so so both of those concepts um explain how motivated we are to uh protect these identities when we're consciously thinking about them or unconsciously thinking about them if it's a deeper broader personal importance like with prominence you did research into this affect control thing uh people heard a story uh so i share a little bit if you could about this the research you did into the uh affect control theory yeah so affect control theory talks more about how we feel towards uh cultural ideas

42:38and how we think about um different components of language so you mentioned language so yeah you might find this this interesting because what we're actually doing is evaluating each um word on three dimensions of meaning um like evaluation potency and activity so evaluation good bad potency strong weak and activity like really active or more passive and slow and there's been a lot of research on showing that these three dimensions of meaning really break down a lot of concepts um just with those three uh factors yeah so this is like part of my dissertation work so

43:16it's been a few years since i've really dove into this um but i remember it being such a cool way to try to quantify how we navigate our social and cultural worlds because um whenever we experience the world in a way that contrasts from what we expect um it creates this like sense of unreality and this kind of like uh-oh response and we're motivated to try to fix that in some way so for example that i think this is example i provided my book um we break one way to study this is through like really

43:53short statements and one statement is um i think like mother hurts child so you break down each of those components even more specifically like mother we think more positively for as a culture so this this word and this concept we think okay mother good hurt is a bad thing so a bad action a strong action and then child we think good so it creates this cultural inconsistency and this psychological inconsistency for us to read that sentence of like mother hurts child we think oh like something we we then are like motivated to reframe one part

44:30of that sentence so maybe the mother we think is a bad person we say like oh this is actually like more of a monster not a mother or hurt maybe we're saying oh maybe hurts is just they're disciplining them they're not actually hurting them so like we're trying to reframe this constantly in our mind to try to make sense of of the world and i think that's an interesting way to think about how we like process identities and biases on a very granular detailed level it's like even at the level of each word we're trying

45:08to make sense of it and we are rejecting these inconsistencies whenever we see them even at a very lower level so to connect to the politics which is like the easy political identity to fit in here if we're a republican or a democrat and we read a story about like democrat hurts person if we're a democrat we read that we're like oh well we're less likely to think that's true but if we're a republican or read that same sentence we're more likely to think that's true because the republicans are evaluating the word democrat very differently

45:45than democrats are so you can really like quantify at a very simple mathematical level how how much conflict people are going to perceive these statements based on their own identities and that's what i was trying to study in my dissertation is really breaking down these political attitudes at this like synaptical level of okay democrats and republicans are going to evaluate each other differently and that also means that they're going to evaluate the likelihood of events differently

46:15based on how they are evaluating different words so like democrats and republicans i think in my dissertation i did use the example democrat hurts person republican hurts person so democrats and republicans evaluated the words hurt and person pretty similarly but they evaluated democrat and republican very differently and you can do this like mathematical equation of seeing how much conflict there is between um the words in that particular sequence so a democrat reading the sentence democrat hurts

46:47person creates a lot of conflict or what's called in the literature deflection because you're saying good word is doing bad thing and that's this big conflict in your mind whereas republicans it creates a lot less deflection and less conflict in their mind because that is more similar to their expectations based on their identities and so we can kind of like mathematically operationalize how much psychological conflict are people experiencing when they read these short sentences and then

47:19you can expand that to like a broader way of how they view their worlds where all right so right from the beginning we're seeing that this person is going to consider this social situation much more or less likely depending on the identities that they have and that likelihood is really what i'm driving at is like how likely do you think this event is and that likelihood is dependent on how you evaluate each component of the social

47:51situation so again if you're viewing the actor in this situation good or bad you're going to view the subsequent behaviors of that actor differently so it's kind of speaking to this broader identity bias but it's really diving into the details of like okay here are the nuts and bolts of where it starts and you can see these like building blocks of identity bias based on how people just evaluate certain words and certain actors uh they experience

48:22uh you know in their environments something you brought up uh i i uh i think it was mason uh who had brought this up i've noticed this and it's it's a strange thing and i'm wondering if you have any insights into this or just any curiosity about it it seems to be in my lifetime and i could be wrong about this and maybe this has happened all throughout history i just happen to be in a pocket

48:54of it what's happening now being in american culture being a democrat or being a republican has become this superordinate identity and you can say left versus right but it seems like this this idea if this becomes salient this becomes the thing and the this mega identity as she was describing it um this feels at least in my lifetime it feels stronger than ever and i'm wondering if you have any insights as to how did that come

49:26about how did why is that now our superordinate identity across all sorts of contexts yeah i think there's uh a variety of reasons for this um one thing has just been how you could talk like the macro level of how political discussion from political leaders has changed has become much more adversarial in just the past few decades so you can see this like top-down effect of people becoming much more aggressive towards their opponents um you know

49:58considering their opponents as the enemy more versus just someone they disagree with and we saw that you know in the 90s with like newt gingrich and stuff like that where the language used was just very different and so that's like the macro level but then there's also the personal level and the environment we are in now is very different than it used to be so we talked about social media social media is just amplifying this existing

50:29process so you already have these social biases these social identities and these networks that amplify these identities but now you can find your own cable channel that supports your political identity whereas before there wasn't like a personal cable channel that it was more of a broad channel that applies to everyone so now it can be personalized with one identity the other but not just cable identities like it was in the 90s and early 2000s now we're

50:59seeing social media you can have your very personalized social media information that will support your identity and tell you the other identity is bad so it's this amplification process and that's really the major vulnerability that i see with these identity processes it's not so much that we have these identities that bias us like yes we should be mindful of these identity biases where it really becomes a problem is the spaces where it's reinforced to be the

51:30superordinate identity like you speak of or this mega identity and what contexts and situations allow for that to happen so any sort of amplification process is going to make us more vulnerable to these identity processes and that could be surrounding ourselves with people who think just like us and are constantly reinforcing our identities and our beliefs and our meanings associated with those identities so that again that could be like a cable news show you watch it

52:00and it's constantly affirming that but then it's not just cable news it's your social networks it's your social media and it's constantly amplifying these existing forces to create such a strong polarization that connects other identities together and that can be because when we are navigating our world we want to associate with people who are like us and share our characteristics and when politics is such a driving force of who we are we want to be around

52:31people who think similarly to us but this can be an issue when we are so motivated to be around people that we uh share characteristics with that we stop associating with people who think differently than us or have different backgrounds and this relates to this idea in this research uh topic that i i talk in a book of this this social psychological concept of social identity complexity and that's that's the really interesting way to think about

53:01identities so it's not just that we have this identities that exist in vacuums but our identities operate in a context of intersecting with other identities and how does that influence us so if we have let's say our political and religious identity how much overlap do those two identities have if they have um complete overlap so this is an extreme example let's say we have like four really important identities in our in our lives which is you

53:31know just an extreme example let's say our political identity our religious identity our volunteer identity and our friend identity so this is who we are so let's pretend that our religious and political identity completely overlap all the meanings are 100% agreement and we volunteer at our place of worship so we are there we care about being a volunteer it's also connected to this and all of our friends are also at this place of worship and also

54:02share our political beliefs then in this example 100% of how we derive our social self-esteem is based on this very narrow lens of meanings of meanings that are all within this four identities that completely overlap and completely amplify and increase the prominence of these identities so it's not just that these are personally important to us but they share meanings with other personally important identities that then enhances the overall importance of those meanings so 100% of how we view ourselves is through this these these few meanings associated with these identities so any information that challenges those

54:39identities challenges 100% of where we derive our self-esteem from so it's a super strong personal attack that makes us motivated to reject it because it feels very very uncomfortable very very negative you can think of the converse of that where we have a much broader set of identities that do not overlap very much so we can still have a political and religious identity but let's say they're not over connected all that much our church doesn't even really talk about politics all that much and let's say we volunteer but we volunteer at like a pet shelter

55:14something completely outside our church and we have friends that maybe a few go to our church but we have a lot of friends who don't go to our church so our friend identity is much broader now our meanings associated with our identities are spread across a wide range of social support systems so whenever we encounter information that challenges our political identity it's only a small subset of where we're deriving self-esteem from and we're much better able to absorb it and process it more objectively because it's not completely attacking our entire sense of self but only

55:50a small component of it and that's how we're more resilient towards misinformation if we're experiencing information that is false that challenges these identities oh that's awesome i'm gonna i'm gonna make a new slide for my next thing i'm gonna present to talk about this it'll take a long time to get here on your own but once you see it it's like oh yeah you kind of have to build it up yeah it's but like once you get it then you can just see it like i know like i literally try to see like what i

56:26visualize this you can write it down on like a map and some people have talked about like how that could help reduce polarization by actually like visualizing your identities on a piece of paper but like you can see how this all connects because we have our identities and our identity maps and how much overlap they have spatially and then you can see the network effects of all those identities amplifying them and then if you really get really crazy and granular you can think about that affect control theory and how we view social situations based on

57:01our evaluations of specific words and actions and how that is all interacting with each other and potentially amplifying our susceptibility to misinformation and bias so it's like it gets really complicated but that in that complexity you can really start to understand the broad effect of how we're vulnerable to these social biases and what we can do about it yeah and i'm imagining uh all throughout our history different types of ways of being civilized uh you know villages communities empires how that alters the the way your identities get a chance to be overlapped just because of

57:37the practicality of the situation and the geographical limitations and you don't have a a media source you don't even have literacy yet you know so because like you it's a my politics and my religion and my friends and my volunteers it's it's all smooshed up and it makes sense that when you meet you suddenly when this group suddenly meets the romans you know like oh wow there's not a whole lot of overlap here exactly yeah so it's it's it's it's wild to think about how much um we can like visualize these processes happening and and

58:12it makes a lot of sense of how strong and quickly that othering can be when it's not just okay it's one identity it's it's this confluence of of all these identities that amplify each other and that's really where that that that polarization stems from this is good stuff okay i i do want to get one last thing in and sure which is uh and this is a question that would take two hours for you to answer so i understand that um but uh in these discussions no matter who you're talking to if you're talking to

58:48somebody who seems like an expert the question is okay what do we do about this because it seems like we're uh like the train's headed for the cliff uh what options are available according to the research we've done

Solutions to Misinformation

59:02that seems actually has a can have some positive impact on all of this is this just an inevitable outcome of what happens when societies get complex or do we have options here and i'm wondering what your thoughts are on that yeah so it is a big question and yeah it will take several hours to to really dive into it but to try to summarize it um what i've been referring to is like the particular vulnerability of our susceptibility to misinformation so when are we most susceptible to misinformation from a social science perspective my point is

59:37that happens under contexts where our identity biases are amplified and reinforced so in order to reduce that vulnerability we need to reduce that reinforcement and amplification process and that's kind of like a good starting point of like okay well now we actually are defining stuff so it's like okay so where do these vulnerabilities take place one is you know social media is an easy one because you can kind of visualize it and i think we have an idea of what that looks like whenever we're in these hyper echo chambers on social media it provides a

1:00:13way to amplify and reinforce these identities so trying to break out of that would be one way like trying to not doom scroll and constantly obsess over whatever your particular political ideology is trying to break out of that and you know i think people are aware of this like the whole idea of like touch grass like that's a common thing like people know like yes sometimes it's good to log off and meet people in the real world and it sounds so simple and obvious but it's true like literally just getting outside outside social media outside

1:00:48whatever these these uh you know these screens or however you're receiving these these this online information it's important to take a break and not allow yourself to become radicalized through this reinforcement process that will take advantage and exploit these identity processes that we've been describing so actually like meeting lots of different people again it seems so obvious and simple but i think it's a really important component to improve our resilience to misinformation we need to expand our diversity of identities and what that could look like is simply volunteering at different places you know getting a

1:01:24new hobby meeting different people joining a sports league so again it's like it seems silly but there's so much power and literally like joining a local sports league and and meeting people from all different backgrounds so that's why i really enjoy sports because one it's like good physical exercise and good for your mental health but also it's good for like your social health like just meeting lots of different people and and being active and thinking about how you know there's a variety of people out here from different perspectives that um you might otherwise not have

1:01:59a chance to meet so personally we can on an individual level we can try to expand our identity maps and do different things meet different people and not have our identities so wrapped up in a narrow set of meetings so we can individually we can do that now the the issue is like what does that look like on a societal level and we don't always have opportunities to do that so in the united states we don't have a lot of what's called third spaces where you know we have our home we have our work but

1:02:35there's not really a lot of good community spaces where we can meet lots of different people so that's kind of the tricky part is like how do we like fund initiatives for more people to do this um you know that requires like a whole structural kind of bigger picture thing but there are opportunities still for people to join sports leagues or volunteer with different things you know meet people at their local libraries and stuff so like there are like publicly available things like that so that's one part i think is like diversifying ourselves diversifying our

1:03:09identities diversifying our networks and then there's the education component which is what i've been working on the last few years it's like not only do we have to be aware of our social biases and work on that but that should be merged with this idea of becoming as media literate as we can like how do we learn how to navigate our media and information landscape as best we can and that speaks to some of the work that i've been doing at notre dame developing these short media literacy games that teaches people uh different aspects of

1:03:44verifying the credibility of sources for example what's called lateral reading often where instead of looking within an article and trying to fact check it within the confines of that article you're going laterally and opening new tabs and seeing who the author is what their biases might be um what outlet are they writing for and what journalistic practices does that particular media outlet have it's like learning those skills is also really important and in the age of ai i think that connects to digital literacy learning the limitations of artificial intelligence and these large language models these

1:04:19chatbots so like there's that whole education component too but the education component i would argue can only go so far you have to have that social understanding as well and that awareness of your own social biases because that allows you to combine the best of both of those techniques where it's like okay now i know how to fact check and i'm aware of my social biases so i'm not just fact checking stuff that's uh inconvenient or convenient for me so that's on the the individual level is like trying to understand how we can learn about

1:04:53our biases learn how to fact check better and how to navigate the the internet so that's individually but then i can also go into like the meso and macro um as well because i think that's also important so i dive into this into my in my book about the meso level of basically communities and what that looks like so we talked about trust and how trust is the social process of how we trust someone when we think they're competent and we think they have our best interests in mind so that might require forming relationships with

1:05:28someone so what i would like to see happen is more of these scientific and medical institutions that have lost some trust actually go out in their communities and form relationships again with their local communities or on social media like actually invest in this and have people speaking about what is the importance of a university what are they actually doing what research are they doing that makes a difference in your life and that reduces this psychological distance between people who are not familiar with universities and the and the universities themselves so you know i often think

1:06:03like i'm i'm within academia i know a lot of scientists and physicians so for me it's a lot easier for me to trust them because i know them personally but if you don't personally know these people then that creates a barrier and it creates an opportunity for someone else to be like hey don't trust those people you don't even know them trust me instead and i think if more opportunities existed for partnerships between uh local community leaders and their hospitals and universities and really invest in those partnerships at a local level and then scale that

1:06:38throughout the united states like that's like my big picture if i could wave a magic wand i would have these hospitals and universities have resources to invest in those community outreach programs um and then of course there's like big big picture of like thinking about social media and what they can do a better job on and that gets really tricky because it requires regulation but i mean some simple things are just like having these companies uh share their data more and have more transparency and that's something unfortunately that we've kind of drifted away from because

1:07:12ideally we'd have independent researchers studying these platforms and having access to their data so we can actually really know what these algorithms are doing and how they're affecting us so that's that's a big component of it as well it should be complicated if you had if you had a simple answer i'd be like me but yeah that is as simple as i can try to be that is it for this episode of the you are not so smart podcast for links to everything we talked about head to you are not so smart dot com or

1:07:47check the show notes right there in your podcast player my name is david mccraney i have been your host in those show notes you can find my book how minds change wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks details or david mccraney dot com and i'll have all of that in the show notes as well right there in your podcast player for all the past episodes of this podcast go to apple podcasts amazon music audible spotify or you are not so smart dot com you can follow me on twitter and threads and

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