Much of public (and private) discourse these days concerns the communication of information and disinformation, on one hand, and the discernment of what information has a factual basis, on the other. With fabrication of textual information and “deep fakes” for video presentations, the suspension of belief is a growing requisite.
I’ve posted about this some time ago but there is a growing set of academic inquiries into the phenomenon. There are some strains of the inquiry that address the judgment of truth and other strains that address decisions to share information with others, mostly via social media platforms.
A classicist friend of mine reminds me that discernment of truth in absorbed information is not a new phenomenon. It’s merely been altered by the medium of transmission of information. He notes that before printed books, a key issue upon receiving some hand-copied bound manuscript was whether the stated author (if any) was correctly recorded and whether the contents of the book correctly reflected the intentions of the author. Alternatively, the act of “copying” the manuscript might have led to massive changes in attributed authorship and the contents. The “truth” of the book was based on a set of associates/friends of the reader. If there was a growing consensus about the veracity of the book in that community, then the reader would tend to assign more credibility to the information.
It’s worth noting that commentaries on the development of scientific thought has similarities. A new set of findings has to be absorbed by a community of peer scientists. Replication and evaluative critiques are tools by which a community comes to share the belief that the findings have merit.
It appears that communities have much to do with discernment of truth as well as norms of sharing information.
Some of the growing literature in the field supports the hypothesis that people vary in the ability to discern information from disinformation. The causal mechanisms don’t seem to have been identified as yet but age, focused attention or analytic thinking, and ideological congruence are correlates.
A separate phenomenon, related to discernment of falsehoods, is the willingness to share information. One basic finding is that readers who find information accurate are more likely to share it than those who judged it to be inaccurate. So far, so good. But there is a confounding variable in the mix – does the reader find the information interesting?
Some new work addresses a class of information whose accuracy may be unresolved – termed “interesting, if true.” The randomized experiments used in the study imply that people may not share false information by mistake, but rather because the information is “interesting, if true.” This finding, if it replicates, may offer an explanation of why, although older persons tend to be more proficient at identifying false information, they tend to share it more prevalently than younger persons. When this is combined with evidence that older persons tend to use social media for strengthening ties with others than for obtaining new information.
There are separate findings that discernment of truth is clouded by whether the information is deemed congruent with the reader’s ideology. Such information may not undergo the analytic critique by the reader in the same way as other information. If it fits with prior beliefs, it doesn’t require careful review. Such information also tends to be shared more readily. It too may be deemed “interesting, if true” and worthy of attention by like-minded others.
Here, we see a contrast between the norms of academia and those of many other publics. An “interesting, if true” result, when academia is performing at its best, mobilizes the field to deep analytic thinking, new inquiries, and open debate. Only if the new survives this onslaught will it continue to be shared. How can the norm of deep thinking be spread more widely?