Cognitive Ability and Vulnerability to Fake News
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
I was surprised that he didn't check out his sources or information before forwarding information: snopes.com and other sites are so readily available and easy to use. I even suggested casually one day how he could check internet rumors with snopes, and he listened, but only muted his forwarding awhile.
So I set up a rule routing his e-mail to a separate folder that I check occasionally. I keep the good jokes and flush the fake news. Nonetheless I find it useful for keeping a finger on him and others who are seriously misled or subject to rumors. That way, I know something of what they think and I can still talk to them w/o being shocked.
I don't want to refuse someone as a person b/c they're not particularly bright or b/c they are unable to navigate the internet sufficiently to check what is true/false. This way I know a little of what they're thinking on current events and can approach them w/o offending them. And I get to hear the good jokes, which I cannot resist!
- Snopes is easy to use and
- usually Snopes has an almost-identical article about each e-mail subject that my friend sends me. So he would, if he checked, see his own e-mail subject and content highlighted with a big banner that said "FALSE" and explained why/how/etc.
e.g. https://www.snopes.com/pizzagate-conspiracy/
I felt both of these would be necessary if he were ever to examine his sources.
> Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely claimed Clinton “acid washed” 33,000 personal emails to delete them. The FBI said Clinton’s tech team used BleachBit, which is a free software program. It does not use chemicals.
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-fact...
First link was this
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/feb/...
> thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working.
Which is true. How did they conclude that he is suggesting "don't love their health care system". You can love NHS and still march because its going broke, marching doesn't imply "don't love".
"We said previously that we encountered challenges in our systems that maps fact checks to publishers, and on further examination it’s clear that we are unable to deliver the quality we’d like for users....Fact checks from independent organizations will still appear alongside articles in search and Google News. "
https://www.poynter.org/news/google-suspends-fact-checking-f...
Fact checks from independent organizations will still appear alongside articles in search and Google News.
Here’s my question: Many will use this data to make themselves feel better (“See, I told you they were all idiots.”) How can this data be used to actually help the problem? Are there techniques that can be applied to help folks who lack high cognitive abilities to see and understand that they’re being manipulated?
It reminds me of the legendary Canadian House Hippo PSA. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE
Is usually my issue.
Or to help ourselves see that? I think it would be a mistake if everyone who read this assumed it was simply a problem with the other side (“See, I told you they were all idiots”). Nate Silver has made a good case that the media's focus on the Comey letter non-story was one of the main factors for Clinton's loss, and it's hard to not see a connection between their refusal to look at their own reporting and their sudden focus on "fake news." Just this week I ran into an NPR fact checker claiming "It’s true that an immigrant can sponsor extended family members for visas"[1] (in context, talking about immigration visas), when that seems to not be the case at all[2].
It's true that shoddy journalism is different from intentional manipulation, but the line between the two is often blurred. You also have the same issue with both - even when people are presented by the facts, they won't reconsider their positions. I've run into this issue in the past - when you present the original source and show how it contradicts a news report, it's not uncommon to get the reply "that can't be true, or else the media would have said so."
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/30/580378279/trumps-state-of-the... [2] https://www.uscis.gov/family/family-us-citizens
How do you figure? The USCIS page talks about the program mentioned by NPR, where a limited number of visas are available for extended family of US citizens.
> A U.S. citizen can file a petition for the following relatives: • Husband or wife; • Children, married or unmarried A U.S. citizen who is at least 21 years or older may also petition for the following relatives: • Parents; • Brothers or sisters.
From my understanding (and from everything I can find on the USCIS site and all other immigration sites), a U.S. citizen can sponsor immediate family members. They can not sponsor extended family members (cousins, uncles, in-laws, etc.).
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/A1...
not trying to cast shade on any arguments made already or anything im just legitimately curious about it from a logical perspective
“immediate family” in US immigration refers to a spouse or fiance of a US citizen, certain minor children of US citizens, and parents of adult US citizens.
“extended family” refers to children (including adult children) of US citizens not considered “immediate family”, adult siblings of US citizens, and spouses and children (including adult children) of permanent residents.
This creates and immense opportunity for lying by way of equivocation, where a statement which is accurate only because the definition of a key term in the context of the statement is different than what the audience understands it to be is used to convey a message which depends on the audience interpreting the statement according to a different definition of that term.
I disagree. They're fact checking this statement that Trump made:
> Under the current, broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.
In response they write:
> It’s true that an immigrant can sponsor extended family members for visas — but only after he or she becomes a U.S. citizen.
The vast majority of people reading the statement and response to it would be unaware that the only "extended family" they can sponsor are their siblings. If anything, it seems to confirm the false statement that "a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives," simply adding some caveats about the process being difficult and taking years.
Not only does it change, but the specific NPR statement is false in both the technical and general senses; but I was responding to the general back and forth on HN about “extended family”, not the specific issued with the NPR claim.
Or as Nate declared there is no path to 270 for Trump. Not quite sure how he declared that as predicting Trump when Nate and 538 predictions were the butt of jokes among Trump supporters.
I'd be cautious about their predictions and would point out anyone that they might be vulnerable to fake news.
In prospect theory, I think this is akin to triggering the Type II system (the "slow" thinking).
Not really being serious here, but this made me chuckle a bit, on an article about fake news, etc. The sentence above literally reads like confirmation bias happening in real time, the way you phrased it.
I'm not saying you are guilty of it here, the phrasing just jumped out at me - and is a good example of the kind of thought, that when we have it, ought to trigger our inner skeptic :P
That kind of dishonesty fools even people on the upper end of cognitive ability.
Modern news cycles are edited together like reality TV shows. The bias is for sensationalism, and for supporting and validating the worldview of the journalists and financial backers involved.
The media’s gestalt can be a massive deliberate lie and con on the entire population, and they can easily achieve that without ever telling a single individual lie.
Which isn’t to say they don’t sometimes resort to flat-out lying, there’s a good amount of that too. But mostly what the “credible” news sources do is take a large selection of truths, and sum them up to a whole that’s deliberately engineered to deceive everybody for the sake of sensational, political and social bias.
Just because a narrative is biased and skewed doesn't disqualify it from being better than other narratives.
It makes it far worse. Very few people take Breitbart seriously but many will take CNN or NYT seriously. The mainstream media is far too powerful to ignore when they push a narrative. Smaller outfits on the far left/right don't pose the same existential threat to our society.
The mainstream media is not that mainstream at all. The principle of 'the big lie' still works very well.
Tabloids and fake news rags on the other hand have been reaching far into the middle class, the non-voters and so forth, in other words they're generating an audience among people who we would have considered to be immune to demagoguery.
Many people take Breitbart seriously and do not take CNN seriously. Alexa ranks it at 52 for US traffic. Many people take CNN seriously and do not take Breitbart seriously. Its site is ranked 25.
In your opinion. Which your entitled to, but to silence the other voices/biases, that's a scary road to take on behalf of the general populace.
> fake news isn’t nearly as prevalent or as dangerous as news that mostly tells the truth as a technicality or formality
Which is demonstrably false, as we can see by the prevalence of large-scale acceptance of outright false propaganda and its aftermath. Breitbart-style lies are far more dangerous than WSJ-style story selection.
I think this makes more sense if you consider instincts around forming alliances, rather than raw cognitive ability. In the real world, a successful belief adoption strategy is not merely one that leads you to correct beliefs, but one that leads you to successful beliefs. In many cases, correct beliefs are the most successful. But social implications can easily override that.
For example, it seems obviously incorrect to believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, since it tells of his own death. But belief in non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was not a successful one in 16th century Europe, since it was considered heretical.
In this case, hearing negative information about someone provides evidence for at least four things:
1. The negative information is true
2. Other people believe the negative information is true
3. That person's social standing is insufficient to prevent this negative information from spreading
3. Assuming the information is false, someone else has reason to spread it
Only the first one of those relates to the objective truth of the information, or has much bearing on the person's character. The rest have much more to do with social consequences of allying yourself with the person in question.
Of course, people don't usually evaluate all of those factors consciously and then think "Well this person is probably good, but they're also a potential pariah who I should avoid associating with". Instead, we have instincts that lead us to better social strategies by shaping our beliefs.
That's obviously not the whole story, since these researchers did find that cognitive ability correlated with attitude adjustment. But I think the social side of this is a crucial piece, and may interact with cognitive ability in ways which might be difficult to control for. For example, it seems plausible that a person with intellectual social status would be more willing to adopt contrarian views, which would make it easier for them to give less weight to the social implications, and more weight to the objective question.
I think a great example of your point is the politics surrounding guns. It's one of the few things I've seen highly educated, left-leaning folks spread/believe fake news about.
My favorite fake news topic about guns is the classic "silencer" debate. So many prominent democrats have railed against "silencers" and how they can make mass shootings more deadly. It's absolute bologna, but it is believed and spread as truth none the less.
Most people don't know that just firing a gun once without ear protection will cause permanent hearing loss. A suppressor will reduce the decibels to the point of it being still incredibly loud, but not as damaging to the ears. It's definitely not "silent"
But if you believe that there are such things as truths and falsehoods and that they can positively and negatively shape our society, we cannot ignore the effect that 'fake news' or other misinformation have on large parts of the population.
We can't drop the pursuit of truth just for the sake of satisfying an angry majority. That's going to turn society into a clown-car.
I don't like it, but it really is a fucking jungle out there. Nature can be cruel and spreading fake news for personal gain is as viable a survival strategy as any other form of parasitism.
Will continue to hold onto naive notions that human existence can have some sort of meaning beyond survival of the best adapted until the sun burns out, however, but it ain't easy. We weren't meant to live like this, dammit!
The article starts with a wrong position. "Fake news" was not invented by Trump, but it was introduced during the election by "PropOrNot". The website, which is probably propaganda by itself, stated that many independent media were Russian propaganda. This unfounded claim was used to help the democratic candidate, after wikileaks published material about pay-to-play and media-bias.
Afterwards the russian propaganda idea was fake news, because there has been no evidence that the election has been strongly manipulated by Russian bots or operatives. Instead researchers find people who have strong opinions and have lots of time to post stuff.
The article has a good point: "If you are convinced that some claim is true, ask yourself why. Is it because you have credible evidence that the claim is true, or is it just because you’ve encountered the claim over and over?" In this I see the media repeating the "Russian hacked the election" thing, for which there is no real evidence. The reports from all agencies only based this idea on rumours. The wikileak documents themselves seem to be downloaded on a USB drive, and not via the internetz. But can we withstand this "fake news", when there is so much support for it? And why is no-one talking about the pay-to-play problem. It is likely a problem of the political system, not just a candidate.
I agree with the solution against fake news. We should have credible evidence. But these should not be "public service announcements". These are usually linked to sponsors or political parties. Most people already disagree on what sources can be trusted. For example I trust wikileaks a lot more than many other people. They stand for freedom of information, unlike their opposition who likes to destroy relevant information (like torture records or emails).
And freedom of information is exactly what is needed for this whole problem. No information should be hidden in a democracy. And that is how we really should solve the fake news /propaganda problem: All relevant information should be available.
Just like every experiment should be repeatable in science.
Specifically, we do have evidence that Russia successfully penetrated some US state voter rolls:
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/372816-russia-succes...
With most propaganda there is some truth. There is some pretty good evidence to suggest that Russia was pumping in propaganda by using bots, trolls, and leaks. But most of it seems unrelated to the election.
So it's an oversimplification to act like none of that was happening. But likewise to assume that it was election-related.
Russia was hacking and using computational propaganda. But that doesn't mean it was targeting the election. There are many variables and they aren't all mutually exclusive.
No, they are different by a matter of degree. Propaganda is all about spin, context, and stretching the truth. Stuff that actually happened but is presented in a mis-represented and misleading fashion. Fake news is completely fabricated and entirely fictional.
Propaganda can be fake news. But it can also be actual facts.
In my mind, unifying idea of "propaganda" is that it is designed to mislead and cause the consumer to draw conclusions different than what might otherwise be reached via an accurate and truthful understanding of the issue. There is a notion of "intent" in propaganda that is absent or explained more by ignorance and naiveté in "fake news".
The idea of "fake news" certainly overlaps with propaganda, but it also includes genuinely sloppy reporting and inaccuracy introduced by ignorance of the subject matter and a willingness to repeat and mimic true propaganda. The sloppiness and inaccuracy often occurs due to confirmation bias in the reporting process.
The entire playing field is rife with people looking to manipulate and exploit. That should be no mystery to anyone. They do it because it's what works. It's the same in every country. Try to run a noble campaign that exempts itself from the game and you end up like Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders, just as trying to run a business while exempting yourself from the game results in fourth-rate also-ran status.
Trump pulled off an amazing feat in destroying this whole apparatus that was set against him (in many cases by simply beating them at their own game -- I'm not trying to claim that his side necessarily used clean tactics), and for anyone who thinks that can all be written off as "fake news" or the even more laughable "Russian interference", well, I have a bridge to sell you. That is a highly simplistic worldview that clearly demonstrates an overriding interest in allegiance to the Democrat tribe more than any serious consideration or critical thinking. To the extent that smart people are involved in propagating these myths, they are doing it for personal gain (see above about playing the game).
I don't know much of American history but isn't this a high bar for finding if people believe "fake news". I mean most people wont know general knowledge perfectly so expecting them to believe a particular lie is perfectly reasonable.
What is concerning about fake news is people believing simpler lies like the stuff Trump says. An example about walls and whatnot.
Additionally, does it even matter? Intelligent people have their own blind spots and biases. The biggest being that because they are smart they must be right.
I think the only rational thing to do is to take a skeptical view of any information presented and not internalize it too much. It really irks me when I read something from a “reputable” news source and the only source is “officials familiar with the matter”. I know people are lapping that garbage up, regardless of how smart they are.
Rejecting information outright is cynicism.
Victim blaming happens when you explain what they should have done to avoid being victimized. You get a lot closer to that with your final paragraph than the article ever does.
It is, indeed, rational to be skeptical of information presented, especially when things are still developing, it is likely that we don't yet have all the facts, or during times of high stress or panic. It is rational to realize we all hold misinformation, and that some of the stuff we've learned is no longer true. But it takes some intelligence to realize this stuff. Furthermore, it takes a bit of energy to do so. Hence otherwise smart folks believing the fake stuff or not being able to pick out truth from the mess. Cognitive ability varies during the day, after all, and with situations (stress, being sleepy or chronic lack of sleep, hangovers, and various other things affect this stuff temporarily at least).
I'll add that some folks that appear "smart" aren't any smarter than the rest of us. Rather, we just meet them in a context that shines the best light on them, they are good at memorizing facts, or their knowledge base differs from our own.
Rest assured, there are plenty of blistering idiots on both sides of aisle, in equal proportions that match the idiocy of the general public (roughly 95/5). The amount of people who have the right combination of raw intellect, disregard for social convention, etc., to make independent and objectively defensible arguments that aren't simple regurgitations of the party line is probably 5%. This is true for basically every group and subculture (possibly except those that are so small they don't qualify as their own group/subculture yet).
Even among groups that attract primarily intelligent people in the absolute sense, like software or physics, most don't have the social courage to speak up when they disagree or to align themselves with someone who is clearly in the minority, nor do they have the interest to consider material in-depth and fully understand it in a way that allows them to internalize its principles and detect fakes or imposters. For the most part, they'll happily follow the crowd, no matter how silly the basis.
As a measure of cognitive ability, we used a 10-item vocabulary subtest from the WAIS. In this subtest, participants are presented with a target word and are asked to select the word from a list of five words that comes closest to the meaning of the target word (Cronbach α = 0.67, M = 6.96, SD = 1.90). The participant's score on this test was used as measure of his/her cognitive ability. Although the use of a subscale to measure cognitive ability may be less informative than full-fledged intelligence tests (see De keersmaecker et al., 2017), such tests tapping into a specific aspect of intelligence can be a valid alternative when administration of broad IQ tests are not feasible.
Although I don't think the study mentions "stupid people." And strictly speaking, you're probably not going to be able to administer even the 10-item vocabulary test before deciding how to make a first impression on someone.
What has really upturned the world though, is people's realization that supposedly neutral institutions like CNN/BBC aren't much different from Fox News. The creators of Fox News were never really wrong about that, even if their reaction was to be even more biased and untruthful. The problem is that it's left people grasping for trust. Jon Stewart filled that role for many, but then he got burned out.
The solution to propaganda is to restrict your intake of information to high quality sources. That means finding specific journalists, and never relying on a media brand like Fox News, CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, or even Reuters. You simply cannot trust a brand, it's not a person.
Wikipedia points to another solution, which is crowdsourced consensus-based information. Restricting your information diet to Wikipedia might actually be reasonable. The process is fairly rigorous and not easily abused without consequence.
(Now that's out of the way): My father in law is a big conservative "fake news" fan. He also watches championship wrestling. I'm not on facebook and don't visit sites of the alt-right persuasion (or really any political persuasion) and so hadn't been exposed to what was happening. And I didn't think anyone really believed far fetched claims. Until we went up for a visit a year or so back and he proceeded to sit with his laptop at dinner proclaiming "Obama is going to jail! it's been proved. He is using someone else's social security number and it's this guy XXX!'. Oh and there was a lot more too! Things I would have believed a rational person of any political persuasion would have questioned. Quite an eye opening experience.
Now, my father in law is not going to be acing medical entrance exams any time soon but he isn't stupid. So I wondered about this phenomenon for a long time. And here's what I concluded. People will willingly suspend rational belief if the payload is something they want to believe or confirms the world of wishes they have built. Smart people, dumb people, all kinds of people. I don't think there is any possible way someone of even a modicum of intelligence could believe championship wrestling is anything but a falsified show for instance. But he watches it. And he pretends it's real. Because he wants to.
So for all the "smart people" thinking "Oh, I knew it! Only dumb people believe in fake news! And that's how Trump got elected!", different manifestation, same phenomenon. Trying to overcome this tendency is a step towards predictive power but whatever makes a person happy I suppose.
Also, this is another bad toy problem like the trolley problem; when you hear false information about something from people that you consider trustworthy, after hearing that information corrected it's not altogether rational to return to a baseline judgment of that thing.
When you hear information from trustworthy sources, you know that something attracted the trustworthy people to examine the subjects of that information, something about what the trustworthy people know about those subjects made them think that the information had a reasonable probability of being true, and the trustworthy people thought that information was important enough for you to consider that they communicated it to you. We want things in courts to be considered in isolation, because the courts are meant to be a final arbiter, and therefore the feedback effect of suspicion feeding suspicion would tend to make the first statement of an authority figure on a person the final judgment of the state on that person. Life is different; if you disregard rumors, and the context of statements (even when ultimately disregarding the content of statements) you're missing a lot.
The problem here is who you trust, not what you trust, and the ability to update trust, not as much the ability to update judgments on things unobserved and unexperienced.
I'd submit that people with lower "cognitive skills" would tend to trust the researchers more, and think that even if the researcher has withdrawn statements about events, they must have had a good reason for thinking them in the first place, and would have made a reasonable effort to avoid lying intentionally. On the other hand, people with higher "cognitive skills" would be more familiar with the format of experiments, and assume that the researcher was lying about everything, and that "Nathalie" didn't exist.
tl;dr, basically, the researchers weren't wearing the right outfit to convince one of the groups.
That’s always seemed a bit cynical to me, but it seems to be more of an essentially realistic statement with every passing day.
The first follow up I have is: How do they define 'lower' cognitive ability?
Assuming they're using IQ score or similar tests that go into an IQ score, what is the transition point? Are we talking about people who are below the norm -1 SD (~85 IQ), around the average of 100, or +1 SD (~115)?
The number of people in/below those ranges are progressively bigger and have a larger impact on things like the popular vote, market trends, etc.
The second follow up I have is: Ok, so now what?
Since this is "cognitive ability" and not "education" convincing people to go to college isn't a solution.
Do you limit voting to people with certain advanced degrees? Do they propose an IQ (or equivalent) test for voting?
Is that the case they're making?
That’s the other key point you missed: distribution and discovery are totally different now. If I set up a newspaper I still had to convince people to subscribe or stock it, TV stations took years to setup, etc. That encouraged moderation to maximize the number of customers. In contrast, now everyone is competing on Facebook and Google News, both of which hate the idea of paying for editorial review and will cheerfully display satire or propaganda on equal footing with established mainstream news sources.
I’m not in love with the gatekeeper model – note that e.g. the 90s Balkan & Rwandan genocides relied on taking over the state media first – but that doesn’t mean that we can ignore the problems we’re seeing now, or that tech companies aren’t being incredibly reckless in their desire to make a slightly higher margin on ad revenue.
When anything significant happens in western politics you can better you bottom dollar it wasn't an un-staged occurrence. Trump was your man before election day. Brexit was the ultimate divisive illusionary 'you have a choice, you can make a difference' nonsense, despite the fact that having one less centralised corrupt level of power is of course worthy of a vote.
Journalism is a dead as a dodo.
Have you been psyop-d into attributing tin-foil hats to anyone who raises there head from the Orwellian / Huxley media sources and takes stock of history, and seeks alternatives from the mainstream, rather than the brain-rotting recycling 'news'. Does 'conspiracy theorist' make your alarm bells go off and want to cease all association?
The thing to invest in is local. Turn away from centralisation for now, until the whole thing is open sourced and you can track your politicians lives into the intimate details, and you have a monetary system that's not debt-based. Once that day comes maybe local won't be your only avenue for hope.