Who falls for fake news? Psychological and clinical profiling evidence
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
People don't realize how much being part of an amateur soccer league or ham radio club or just any community increases our resilience as a society.
Strangely your comment holds true in areas where community means you get many different perspectives.
In my experience (growing up in the south), it's "strong-knit" communities that are doing the most harm in perpetuating mistaken beliefs or amplifying anger.
What's especially weird is that this holds true when some communities' economic status is considerably better than the majority of the country!
There's a momentum behind beliefs that get culturally amplified. And it's hard to disagree with people when you don't have immediate examples to compare and contrast. Or worse, when your very livelihood gets threatened for going against the flow.
My own experience (given the above) is why I'm eternally grateful for the unfiltered internet I had when I was growing up. I wouldn't be half the person I am today without the many varied perspectives that I had access to per-social media bubbles.
One can have a community that isn't supportive, and that can be harmful. As you point out, you're grateful you were able to have access to other communities that helped you in life.
One can have a supportive community that is supporting something that might be harmful, as well. I got out of the community that raised me quick as lightning. They were decent, good-hearted people; they just had different ideas what they were willing to accept out of members of their community.
It's very much a Goldilocks problem. Everyone needs to find the community that's "just right", and that's hard. Even with the internet, because it's so easy to find the harmful but supportive communities.
This kind of blase generalization is rather silly but all too common. It also presupposes that some general fix, preferably delivered by someone "who knows better" is in order. People in general are many different things at different times, each with their own variable causes and fixes that are mostly contextual in specific ways.
There's no shortage of community today, both of the literal physical kind and more recently even in a digital version, and if people are "hurting" for lack of community, then they're doing so no more than they would have in the past when establishing contact with others for friendship, shared ideas and love was much more labour intensive.
Also, if you think ill-adaptations, ignorant beliefs and paranoias are common today, you should take a closer look at most of history, in which entrenched interests of all kinds promoted all sorts of false beliefs, xenophobias, paranoias, nationalistic shit and other grossly dishonest beliefs across the board. They were pervasive, harder by far than today to counteract and much more widely entrenched. Large swathes of the population held these beliefs with terrible outcomes in many cases and if anything, it's something that's now decreasing like never before despite all the politically-biased screeching about fake news and "misinformation", often used as a justification for exactly the kind of limited, controlled and more centralized information distribution that used to REALLY promote enforced community and lies for the sake of political interests.
Even well-recognized psychological models have shown that people are smarter than ever, in general and in many specific ways. The Flynn effect has been well documented and though it has a number of likely causes, one of them is surely access to a far broader plurality of information and cultural exposure, with both the bad and the good (however you want to define those).
Moreover, at least now, whenever some idiotically wrong, self-serving or viciously dishonest belief gets promoted by certain groups, counter-groups can form to discredit it and allow for some genuine diversity of ideas, though many call this by another grossly simplistic but insult term, "polarization", which apparently should be eliminated so we can all believe supposedly correct things (though as defined by some specific self-interested agenda or another).
No thanks, I prefer a world in which someone who generalizes that people are hurting can't easily force them to connect, read, view and think in specific ways as decided by someone else until that authority smugly decides they're no longer hurting.
> Pseudoscientific beliefs are frequently irrational (e.g., believing in the existence of the Loch Ness monster)
Not so long ago the belief that rocks can fall from the sky was regarded as irrational and magical. Then meteorites were theorized, observed and predicted. In short, one should reserve a degree of skepticism for skepticism.
When was this and which people, specifically, did so?
Everywhere you travel, it seems, there are old stories about sky iron - Tibetian Thokcha and other names elsewhere.
But who were the people who regarded such stories as irrational and magical. How widespread was that belief?
This obsession with "proof" and "data" is anti scientific.
> And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.
Joshua 10:11
( If your routinely clean your gutters and pick through the silt with a strong magnet you'll likely find micro meteorites sooner or later )
The Global Fireball Observatory is an multi-institutional collaboration, with partner networks around the world. Our observatories take pictures of fireballs so we can recover any meteorites that might have landed on the ground.> "Gentlemen, I would rather believe that two Yankee professors would lie than believe that stones fall from heaven."
http://www.meteorlab.com/METEORLAB2001dev/metics.htm#:~:text...."
(EDIT: immediately followed by (in link provided):
Whether Jefferson's quote is truth or myth, his belief real or an opportunity for a witty Virginian to take a shot at a two Yankees, is not known
Leaves the question of whether that was a widespread belief.
TBH it's the first I'd heard that anyone had ever not believed in rocks falling from the sky .. I'm 60 ish, have worked for decades in geophysics and read the original Scottish geologists, etc.
http://www.meteorite.fr/en/basics/meteoritics.htm
From which:
> Until the early 19th century, most scientists shared Isaac Newton's view that no small objects could exist in the interplanetary space - an assumption leaving no room for stones falling from the sky.
And...
>... From this, he [Ernst Florens Chladni] was forced to conclude that meteorites were actually responsible for the phenomena known as fireballs, and, more importantly, that they must have their origins in outer space. His view received immediate resistance and mockery by the scientific community.
What does that mean?
Or to quote Shakespeare: 'There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy'.
Why though? In what way does it benefit me or society to give everyone with a theory attention? Yes, some percentage of the time these theories are true, but I feel they are lost in the noise of every other false claim.
If your belief is true, prove it, but if you can't, why should I care? In my opinion, skepticism should be the default.
I agree with the sentiment that some sane skepticism should be the default, but only as long as it's a genuinely neutral stance that is open to evaluate the arguments that support a claim. Skepticism tends to be perceived as a key quality in critical thinkers, so nowadays, everybody thinks they're a skeptic. Right? However, what is presented as skepticism, if observed under a lens, can often be traced to plain ol' denial, or dogmatism in favor of a competing hypothesis. Imo, the weakest link of the scientific method is the human element, with its various biases and motivations. Good science is still being done, but I believe that nowadays we tend to give scientists too much moral and ethical credits, despite the mounting evidence that we should be skeptical not only about their conjectures, but also their refutations.
I will also observe that default skepticism can easily become entrenched skepticism. An example: in 1867 the youngish James Clerk Maxwell presented the theory of radio waves to the esteemed old men of the Royal Society. They dismissed his idea, claiming it to be a form of induction, despite being presented fairy strong theoretical and practical evidence to the contrary.
To quote Arthur C Clarke: "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Or to quote Shakespeare: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
For instance, when Covid was at maximum political polarization, you had some people partying like it's nothing and other people convinced that the Covid mortality rate was 20%. Both groups may have been swayed by fake news, but with different directionality.
You also need to provide similar sets of facts in different contexts. E.g. news that came from a friend vs a three-letter agency vs podcast vs CNN vs Fox News.
As presented in the article, the study just seems to be a conformity test.
Cognitive Dissonance has to be genetic.
Pretty much everyone.
difference is how much, and if it's edge cases vs. full-on rube
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S205229752...)
Just a few years ago, the media was in a frenzy of "fact checking" discrediting doctors and people (including the President Of The United States) who were taking HCQ as treatment for CoViD-19.
The same frenzy of "fact checking" occurred for stories about the point of origin for the virus. People and scientists were ridiculed and mocked for claiming it may have come from a lab in China, which is now the best theory.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/18498/
The paper cites lots of obviously fake news, but the two (contemporaneously significant and true) stories I cited above were credible, and some group or groups seemed to not want them circulated. THAT is the conspiracy theory that should be investigated. Was it just an honest mistake, or was there something more sinister, such as collusion between NIH and pharmaceutical companies?
Here's another conspiracy theory; perhaps the purpose of this paper to discourage people from sharing controversial news items and just believe what the government/media tells them, regardless of legitimate doubt?
Here's a link to a recent HN post about skepticism in science, which used to be considered a good and normal thing. I wonder if Carl Sagan were still alive today, whether he might be labeled as "climate skeptic", or heretic by those in "authority."
The more and varied sources for news that are used, the less likelihood of people falling for fake news.
If you look at US-based news sources only, you will receive only US-biased news. If you look at Chinese-based news sources only, you will receive only Chinese-biased news. The same thing applies for news sources from Europe, Africa, Middle-East, Russia and India.
By sourcing news from world-wide sources, you will get a much broader set of news stories. Many of those stories will cancel out most biases, leaving a kernel of information that is more unbiased than not.
However, most people refuse to look for views that might differ from their own.
In their conclusions, #3 finishes with a sentence that sure looks like someone accidentally a word or phrase.
>(3) Individuals who do not effectively detect fake news tend to have higher levels of anxiety, both state and trait anxiety. These individuals are also highly suggestible and tend to seek strong emotions. Profiles of this type may inappropriately employ intuitive thinking, which could be the psychological mechanism that.
True Scotsman's "doesn't fall for fake news" is more of a matter of intellect, than psychology.
It goes with personality to the extent that stupid is a personality.
The paper includes the interesting finding that vaccine resistant/hesitant and vaccine acceptant individuals had very different (not to mention statistically significant) personality profiles at 18 years of age.
From the abstract:
"Vaccine-resistant and vaccine-hesitant participants had histories of adverse childhood experiences that foster mistrust, longstanding mental-health problems that foster misinterpretation of messaging, and early-emerging personality traits including tendencies toward extreme negative emotions, shutting down mentally under stress, nonconformism, and fatalism about health. Many vaccine-resistant and -hesitant participants had cognitive difficulties in comprehending health information. Findings held after control for socioeconomic origins. Vaccine intentions are not short-term isolated misunderstandings. They are part of a person's style of interpreting information and making decisions that is laid down before secondary school age. Findings suggest ways to tailor vaccine messaging for hesitant and resistant groups."
[0] https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/1/2/pgac034/65534...
Probably the same people that fall for email scams / phishing.
Fake news rewards a belief choice that healthy people indulge in every day.
While not wanting to get too into a religious debate, I think that religion teaches us that belief does not require evidence, but reward. I saw a video of someone making an elaborate orange juice for church. Price of admission- if you want that orange juice and spend time with 100 friendly people, is that you have to assent to a belief system.
This effectively teaches individuals that, if an organization can create an "Atmosphere of Plausibility" or "Illusion of Consensus", then the individual has permission to enter the tribe by accepting a belief. From there, an "us versus the world" bond is established, and outside groups/nonbelievers who want to "destroy the bond" or "destroy the group" are considered hostile.
This relates to fake news because we are trained that a belief requires minimal evidence as long as the social opportunities it affords are substantial. In fact, the greater the leap of defiance against evidence, demonization of "experts", etc, the more that a tribal bond is reinforced.
Since I've already crossed a line by discussing religion, I'll refrain from addressing politics aside from saying that this theory of "Belief Bonding" seems to fit with some paradoxes in American Politics quite well.
edit - clarity
Exactly. Besides, it is unethical, unscientific, and dangerous; i.e., you'll end up labeling large masses of people as insane because disinformation and misinformation are merely new terms for propaganda, which is public relations, which is marketing and advertising, and so on and so forth. Maybe they, the authors, the arbiters of truth, would allow me to test their sanity by asking them questions about my field? Or maybe they'd like to also classify people's sanity based on things like who buys some unneeded garbage prompted by online advertisements? Or based on who votes whom?
Sure: plenty of intellectuals, including great writers and scientists, indeed have been propagandists. People like Merton even worked in war propaganda. There are plenty of experts in marketing too. And then there are people like Dugin, Zakharova, etc.
But please do not take this comment as a statement that all experts or intellectuals would always be propagandists. What I am trying to say is that we should really try to move away from these simple categories (true vs. false, disinformation vs. information, etc.) in order to understand the current information chaos. The dichotomous categories also promote the false hope that technical (AI/ML) solutions could be used to tackle the issue.
There's one objectively correct version of understanding the world and the important idea is to camp people into binary groups of "believes correct news" or "believes fake news"
It's easy to run a study on their followers.
Now - it's never been possible to have a news organization which specializes in "100% not fake news", because every organization is going to have some slant or bias. For organizations which really with the best intentions try to present the absolute truth, you're never going to convince everyone you're not "fake news", on account of there not being such a thing as 100% objective reality. All observers are flawed.
"In this paper the authors analyzed the symptomatic differences observed between two groups: (1) people who effectively discriminated online fake news, and (2) people who ineffectively discriminated online fake news. The symptomatic differences were based on four personality disorders, symptoms that characterize psychotic spectrum disorders (PSD), anxiety, and addiction disorders. The main objective of the study was to find out whether symptom levels of the disorders analyzed increased or decreased as a function of the individual's ability to detect fake news online."
Maybe they should be profiling the purveyors of disinformation, the propagandists, instead. In fact, they explicitly take the role of a propagandist themselves in this piece, supplying the participants with information they've concluded to be false. Besides, a lot of questionable assumptions and papers cited. Given the situation during the pandemic, the approach is completely bogus to begin with:
"The COVID-19 fake news test consists of 18 statements about coronavirus; 6 false (fake news), 6 true, and 6 indeterminate (i.e., due to lack of evidence, it was not possible to establish content veracity). To ensure validity, statements were worded according to the World Health Organization (2020) guidelines for identifying true and false news. After reading each statement, participants indicated whether content was true (“YES”), false (“NO”), or whether they were uncertain (“?”). For each correct response a point was awarded, other answers received no points (errors were not penalised). Correspondingly, total scores ranged from 0 to 18 points."
"The duration of the sample collection was 7 months (from March to September 2021)."
Now, at minimum, they should disclose what were the true and false statements in 2021. In other words, the "correct" answer during that time would have probably been "uncertain" (?) to all items asked.
I think some of correct answers are definitely wrong.
Nevertheless, to my limited understanding, I think this is questionable because it tends to indicate an absolute answer instead of a probability:
"Coronaviruses can be deadly at any age."
I think this also turned out to be false according to the latest in media, if I recall correctly:
"Coronavirus can be prevented through vaccination."
Someone also linked a paper on these "stimulant substances", but I have no idea about that.
And as said, you have to reflect all this during the uncertainty in the middle of the pandemic in 2021.
And the decoder ring of text beneath it are enlightening... "Trait Anxiety, State Anxiety, Negative Affect, Histrionism, Schizotypy, Paranoia, Narcissism, Simulations (Barnum Effect), Suggestibility and Search for emotions."
5. Conclusions recommend different approaches for several sub-groups, including "reinterpreting sensationalism in the media and promoting critical thinking in social network users."
Do we still remember the weapons of mass destruction from Iraq [0]? Assad being accused of the Douma gas attack [1]. Stating vaccines are safe & effective while the contracts received by governments stated that both effectiveness and long-term safety of vaccines was not known [2]? Or the claim that the Hunter Biden laptop leak was Russian disinformation [3]?
In this day and age, we really have to question everything - sadly. Seems all major news sources are compromised by governments or intelligence agencies in order to push their agendas.
---
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/03/1151160567/colin-powell-iraq-...
[1]: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/16/chem-d16.html
[2]: https://archive.org/details/contract_03/page/48/mode/2up (page 49)
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/us/politics/republicans-h...
The China in the western news and the China I know in real life are completely different. In the news, China is always framed as evil - always up to no good. In real life, it's just a freaking country where life is peaceful, stable, things are improving, people are getting wealthier, society is improving.
Also, most Americans believe that China has the same anti-American propaganda in Chinese society. This is wrong. Most normal Chinese people I've met over the last 2-3 years don't have the same "hate" for Americans as Americans have for the Chinese. Chinese people understand that it's just political, two countries fighting for resources. It's not very personal to them. However, Americans have a real "hate" for the Chinese through relentless anti-China propaganda in the news and Americans see it as much more personal based on my experience.
Americans just assume that the Chinese hate them as much as they hate the Chinese because of how much anti-China is in the media. Therefore, they believe that the Chinese must have the same or higher levels of anti-American in their media.
Propaganda is powerful. Don't ever tell me America has free press. It doesn't. Not on the national scale.
To answer your question: Zero. I'm an American who works in big-tech as my main source of income.
Thankyou.
(FWiW I'm a non asian descent Australian)
Then 9/11 happened and they chose instead for wars in Central Asia. But at least we got the iPhone. We’d probably all still be using flip phones with Plan A.
Poor neocons, it must bug them their ideas became so progressive.
> Assad being accused of the Douma gas attack
into talking about other people falling for "fake news."
Of course, it turns out you're the one falling for laughable "fake news": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29303775
You're much better off listening to and retweeting, checks notes, Zaid Hamid, supporter of Jihad, 9/11 was false flag, and "Bill Gates wants to kill the people of this region."