By Ben Mills
Fake news is becoming a crisis. But why do we believe it?
On October 2nd 2017, the world woke up to yet more tragic news; a gunman had opened fire on concert-goers in Las Vegas, killing 58 people in a spree of violence, seemingly increasingly common in the USA today. Yet not everybody woke up to the same story.
Searching on platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter may have revealed an array of varying versions of events manipulated by people to suit their own purposes. In other words, fake news. One conspiracy theory suggested the shooter was an extreme-leftist leading an army of anti-Trump supporters, while others immediately tied them to the radical “Islamist” group, Islamic State. Despite the absurdities of the claims based on entirely unfounded evidence, they were rapidly absorbed and shared by readers online. As time passed on and the events of that fateful night began to unravel, it became obvious such claims possessed no truth whatsoever. The man behind the shooting was 64 year old Nevada resident Steven Paddock. Drinker. Gambler. No motives behind why he carried out the attack. In many ways, it’s a description synonymous with many who carry out these disgraceful mass shootings in America, but moreover, it’s a description which did not match at all most of the stories spread in the aftermath of the attack.
This “fake news”, despite the influx of the term into the media over recent years, is not a new concept. Rumours and stories which possess little truth have been around since civilisation began, with one researcher in the past declaring that “lying is an unavoidable part of human nature”. In recent years however, the rise of social media and greater polarisation in politics across the world has enhanced the risk and danger of widespread lies. As seen after Las Vegas, rumours, thanks to social media, wide ranging internet access and a more connected globe, can spread like wildfire, through channels of information which we deem to be trustworthy. As seen after Las Vegas, rumours can now be manipulated into things which are more like propaganda than mere lies.
Even more dangerously, these are stories which are believed. Stories which, despite so little rooting in actual, physical evidence, despite the countless variations and contradictions, are spread and considered as truth. It poses a tough psychological question which seems increasingly important to solve. Why do we believe fake news?
So far, psychologists haven’t got very far solving this question, and opinions differ. Researchers do, however, appear to have one common theory which may offer the answer. Selfish as it may sound, many studies have suggested that we are inclined to believe information which presents the same views and opinions as us, even if we have reason to suspect it may be untruthful.
As a psychologist at New York University told the NZ Herald, "Having a really high-quality news source doesn't matter that much if we think the people producing it belong to a different group than us.” In other words, it doesn’t matter how reliable a news source is - our brain often decides whether it is truthful or not with strong bias towards our own beliefs. This is because our ideas and beliefs are core to our identity, and, as humans, we have a natural tendency to defend ourselves and what we think.
A related idea based upon research published in the European Journal of Social Psychology suggests that the tendency of person to believe in news stories or conspiracies which sound false may stem from how important they believe being unique is.
The study, in which 238 people were asked how much they value uniqueness before being provided with news stories (including a fake news story, about 8 politicians being killed in a bus crash) and asked whether they believed them or not, found a strong correlation between those who valued uniqueness more and those who believed the obviously fake story.
Psychologists leading the study in this case suggested that some people may subconsciously think a story which sounds false if they have a desire to be different. Both of these theories also suggest that on some level we know if a story is false or not. We just choose to believe it’s true.
Another study on fake news conducted by a team of researchers at Yale University offers a different view on why we believe false stories, using a psychology theory first hypothesised back in the 1970s to support it.
Known as the illusory truth effect, the theory suggests that the more we hear a piece of information, the more we believe it to be true. This is because when you hear something again which you’ve already heard it sparks quicker responses to it in your brain. Psychologist of memory and learning at the Vanderbilt University, Lisa Fazio, explains, “your brain misattributes [the quicker responses] as a signal for it being true”. So the more something is repeated to us, the more we mix up the familiarity of it and its truthfulness.
In the study conducted by Yale, participants were given six real and six fake news headlines and asked to judge their accuracy. They were then distracted by another task for a period of time, before being provided with another list of headlines. This time there were 24 of them, and out of those 6 of them were the same fake headlines they saw earlier. The results were a perfect exemplification of this illusory truth effect; when exposed to fake headlines they had already seen before, the participants were more likely to accept them as truths.
The dangers of such an effect become even more significant in the connected modern society we have today. Social media allows news not only to be spread, but through sharing posts, repeated again and again and again. The US election in 2016, now notorious for the widespread use of fake news to influence voters, epitomises this idea of social media and the illusory truth effect.
Just recently, Facebook admitted to the US Congress during an investigation into claims of Russian meddling with the 2016 elections that at least 126 million of its users came into some contact with false information spread by Russian agents on the platform during the campaign. It’s no surprise then, considering the illusory truth effect, that this information had such a big influence - according to the illusory truth effect, once it had been shared multiple times, more people began to see it as truth.
This theory, and all those discussed, do help to form an idea of why the problem of false information spread in the media has become so huge over recent months.
But a lot of questions remain unanswered. Is there a definitive reason why we believe so called “fake news”? Does it stem from an instinct to defend our views? Is it because of the illusory truth effect? Or do we simply just take all news in and accept it as truth?
The real truth is that at the moment we can only theorise why. But research is going into the field. Just last week, a study on fake news published in Science magazine called for “interdisciplinary research to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed”.
It is vital that such research as encouraged in that report is put into studying the psychology behind our acceptance of false news as truth in the coming years. As we’ve already seen in recent times, the scale of the problem is immense. And it will only continue to grow.
The world is becoming a much more dangerous place, with tensions mounting globally. Whether it be vicious conflict in the Middle East, the rise of extremist parties in politics across the world, or fraught relations between the west and the likes of Russia and North Korea, it seems like a tiny spark could lead to disaster. Just imagine. One piece of false information posted online, accepted as truth, shared across the world. Who knows what damage could be caused.
Fake news is the crisis of our times. The more we understand about the principles behind why we believe it, the quicker we can learn how to combat it and eradicate it from our world forever.
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