When–And Why–Facts Don’t Matter

One of the abiding frustrations of contemporary life is the widespread resistance to facts–people’s rejection of probative evidence that X is true and Y (no matter how desirable) is not.

Perhaps I’ve just been paying closer attention as I’ve aged, but it certainly seems to me that the prevalence of disinformation and outright lies characterizing American political life has become a bigger problem ever since the appearance of Fox News and MAGA Republicanism.

We’re about to enter a two-year period where GOP whack jobs like Jim Jordan conduct fact-free (or at least, fact-distorted) Congressional “investigations” into everything from Hunter Biden’s laptop to Anthony Fauci.  Reports from this year’s Climate Summit remind us that we have yet to make many of the changes necessary to combat climate change–a delay attributable in part to the climate deniers who for years refused to accept what science (and the evidence of their eyes) was telling them. Anti-vaccine lunacy has been responsible for thousands of deaths.

Other examples are too numerous to list.

The problem is, our form of government owes its philosophical basis to the Enlightenment–and if the Enlightenment prioritized anything, it was empiricism–the search for and analysis of falsifiable evidence–as a critical method to understand the world we inhabit.

When public officials occupy different realities, governance becomes impossible.For that matter, if people resist believing what their senses  and investigations are telling them, the entire edifice of civilization crumbles.

In 2017, New Yorker article titled “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” explored both the importance of separating fact from fiction, and the reasons contemporary humans seem to be incapable of doing so. The article began by describing studies conducted at Stanford that attempted to understand the stubborn staying power of people’s initial impressions. In the experiments, even total refutation of the subjects’ initial beliefs was insufficient to make them change their minds.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

How indeed?

In a book titled “The Enigma of Reason, ” a couple of cognitive scientists tried to answer that question. They pointed out that “reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.”

The basic argument is that human beings’ biggest advantage is our ability to coöperate.  Reason, they posit, “developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.”

Think about it. If the capacity for reason developed to allow humans to generate sound judgments, it would be hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. After all, an inaccurate view of reality is a significant threat to survival. But here we are, and here–still–is confirmation bias. The authors concluded that it must have some adaptive function related to our “hypersociability,” and that it may actually have evolved to prevent us from getting screwed by other members of our group.

Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments…

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us… the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

The article goes on to describe two other books dealing with the ways we contemporary humans encounter–and dismiss– facts. (For one thing, we all believe we understand far more than we actually do–a deficit that becomes clear when we are asked for detailed information.) It’s a fascinating, albeit somewhat depressing, read.

Bottom line: For those of us who want public policies to be based on sound evidence and facts, the literature is not reassuring.

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The Big Lie Era

The expression “the big lie” was coined by Adolf Hitler; in Mein Kampf, he defined it as the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

These days, Americans are so swamped with lies, big and small, that nothing surprises us. Our problem is that we are increasingly reluctant to accept anything as the truth.

Fake news. “Post-fact” analyses of issues. An unremitting war on science and evidence. “Alternative facts.” Self-serving lies by politicians to obscure the reality that they are carrying water for donors and special interests. Big business enterprises peddling confusion and dangerous disinformation (as the tobacco companies famously admitted, “doubt is our product”) to protect their bottom lines.

The debates over Obamacare provide recent examples. Aetna made big news when it announced that it was pulling out of all but four of the 15 states where it was participating  in the Obamacare exchanges because it was losing too much money. A federal judge ruled that was a blatant falsehood— Aetna made its decision primarily in response to a federal antitrust lawsuit blocking its proposed $37-billion merger with Humana. Aetna had threatened federal officials with the pullout before the lawsuit was filed.

Obamacare has its flaws, but rather than fixing them–rather than providing the tweaks that all new programs require as implementation discloses problems–our lawmakers also chose to lie, in order to escape blame for denying twenty million Americans continued access to healthcare.

The Trumpists have indeed scrubbed the White House’s page detailing the accomplishments of the Affordable Care Act. The previous White House, knowing this was coming, took the precaution of archiving it and saving it for posterity, and for everyone who knows better to have it to point to.

But make no mistake, the theme from the Trump lie machine is going to be that Obamacare was doomed to fail, as Charles Gaba points out. Republicans started this back in December, figuring out how to make the disaster they create when they repeal the law without a replacement all Obama’s fault. And they’re moving forward with that plan.

Today, peddling “big lies”–about Obamacare, about global climate change, about “terrorist threats” or American “greatness”–is much easier than it was in Hitler’s day, because we not only have “alternative facts,” we have “alternative” news sources. A friend who decided to sample news coverage of the massive, spontaneous airport protests following Trump’s horrific Executive Order discovered that Fox News simply didn’t cover them. People who get their (mis)information exclusively from Fox wouldn’t even be aware that the protests occurred.

Steve Bannon, who is effectively running the country while the delusional “President” watches movies and tweets compulsively, ran a propaganda “news” organization prior to his fortuitous (for him) elevation to power. He clearly understands–and embraces– the power of the Big Lie.

Unfortunately, that isn’t his only area of agreement with Hitler.

There has never been a time when real journalism–and the ability of ordinary citizens to distinguish between truth and lies, propaganda and reality–has been more important.

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Do Facts Matter Any More?

Fake news. “Alternative” facts. Welcome to the age of Trump.

There is no generally accepted definition of “fake news,” and no bright line separating it from the increasing proliferation of propaganda, but the essential characteristic is that it is not factual. (Fake news is not, as Trump asserts, any news that disparages him.)

Concern about fake news has risen, and Facebook and Google have recently announced steps to combat it. Journalist’s Resource has compiled the still-scanty academic research on the phenomenon.

While much has been written about fake news, scholars have published a limited amount of peer-reviewed research on the topic. Below, Journalist’s Resource has compiled studies that examine fake news and the spread of misinformation more broadly to help journalists better understand the problem and its impacts. Other resources that may be helpful are Poynter Institute’s tips on debunking fake news stories and a well-circulated list of fake, unreliable and questionable news websites compiled by Melissa Zimdars, a communication professor at Merrimack College. The First Draft Partner Network, a global collaboration of newsrooms, social media platforms and fact-checking organizations, was launched in September 2016 to battle fake news.

Starting in January 2017, Stony Brook University, home to the Center for News Literacy, will offer a free online course in news literacy.

The research papers described at the link are worth reading; they confirm what most of us suspect–namely, that misinformation, propaganda and fake news have a pernicious effect. Especially when you consider that most of us engage in confirmation bias–looking for information that validates our preferred versions of reality–it can be difficult or impossible to disabuse people of “facts” they want to believe.

As I tell my students, if you truly believe that aliens landed at Roswell, I can find you several websites confirming that belief. (Some even have pictures of the aliens’ bodies!)

As troubling as this aspect of our current information environment is, what makes it far more troubling is the election of a President with a very tenuous connection to reality, and a staff willing to double down on his consistent lies and misstatements. Never before, to my knowledge, have we had an administration for which facts are at best irrelevant and at worst enemies to be contradicted.

The latest evidence of this Administration’s allergy to facts was a surreal “press conference” on Saturday, in which Sean Spicer berated the media for reporting “falsehoods” about the size of the inauguration crowds. (Trump had asserted that it “looked like a million and a half people.”)

The New York Times reported,

An expert hired by The Times found that Mr. Trump’s crowd on the National Mall was about a third of the size of Mr. Obama’s in 2009….

Speaking later on Saturday in the White House briefing room, Mr. Spicer amplified Mr. Trump’s false claims. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” he said.

There is no evidence to support this claim. Not only was Mr. Trump’s inauguration crowd far smaller than Mr. Obama’s in 2009, but he also drew fewer television viewers in the United States (30.6 million) than Mr. Obama did in 2009 (38 million) and Ronald Reagan did in 1981 (42 million), Nielsen reported.

For that matter, most estimates showed that the Women’s March the next day drew three times more people — about 500,000 — than Trump’s swearing-in ceremony, but the White House flatout refused to accept those numbers.

Nor was Spicer the only Administration figure to make bizarre claims. On Sunday morning, Kellyanne Conway said the Trump team is offering “alternative facts” to media reports about President Trump’s inauguration. (This led to immense amusement on social media, with people posting things like “I’m thin and rich” and “Best game the Green Bay Packers ever played” #alternative facts.)

In the wake of the election, many of us worried–and continue to worry–that our unstable new President would take America into a misconceived war. We didn’t realize that the first war he would declare would be a war on reality and those pesky and inconvenient facts.

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