Poisoned by preconceived notions

If you needed something else to make you worry about our capacity to make decisions based on facts, go no further than a study that came out this week from the University of Texas at Austin.

Entitled "Fake News on Social Media: People Believe What They Want to Believe When it Makes No Sense At All," the study was conducted by Patricia L. Moravec, Randall K. Minas, and Alan R. Dennis of the McCombs School of Business.  And its results should be seriously disheartening for just about everyone.

What they did was a pair of experiments using students who were "social media literate" -- i.e., they should know social media's reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth -- first having them evaluate fifty headlines as true or false, and then giving them headlines with "Fake News" flags appended.  In each case, there was an even split -- in the first experiment, between true and false headlines, and in the second, between true and false headlines flagged as "Fake."

In both experiments, the subjects were hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, to monitor their brain activity as they performed the task.

In the first experiment, it was found -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- that people are pretty bad at telling truth from lies when presented only with a headline.  But the second one is the most interesting, and also the most discouraging.  Because what the researchers found is that when a true headline is flagged as false, and a false headline is flagged as true, this causes a huge spike in activity of the prefrontal cortex -- a sign of cognitive dissonance as the subject tries desperately to figure out how this can be so -- but only if the labeling of the headline as such disagrees with what they already believed.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So we're perfectly ready to believe the truth is a lie, or a lie is the truth, if it fits our preconceived notions.  And worse still, what the researchers saw is that in general, even though subjects had an uncomfortable amount of cognitive processing going on when they were confronted by something that was the opposite of what they thought was true, it didn't have much influence over what they thought was true after the experiment.

In other words, you can label the truth a lie, or a lie the truth, but it won't change people's minds if they already believed the opposite.  Our ability to discern fact from fiction, and use that information to craft our view of the world, is poisoned by our preconceived notions of what we'd like to be true.

Before you start pointing fingers, the researchers also found that there was no good predictor of how well subjects did on this test.  They were all bad -- Democrats and Republicans, higher IQ and lower IQ, male and female.

"When we’re on social media, we’re passively pursuing pleasure and entertainment," said Patricia Moravec, who was lead author of the study, in an interview with UT News.  "We’re avoiding something else...  The fact that social media perpetuates and feeds this bias complicates people’s ability to make evidence-based decisions.  But if the facts that you do have are polluted by fake news that you truly believe, then the decisions you make are going to be much worse."

This is insidious because even if we are just going on social media to be entertained, the people posting political advertisements on social media aren't.  They're trying to change our minds.  And what the Moravec et al. study shows is that we're not only lousy at telling fact from fiction, we're very likely to get suckered by a plausible-sounding lie (or, conversely, to disbelieve an inconvenient truth) if it fits with our preexisting political beliefs.

Which makes it even more incumbent on the people who run social media platforms (yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Mark Zuckerberg) to have on-staff fact checkers who are empowered to reject ads on both sides of the political aisle that are making false claims.  It's not enough to cite free speech rights as an excuse for abrogating your duty to protect people from immoral and ruthless politicians who will say or do anything to gain or retain power.  The people in charge of social media are under no obligation to run any ad someone's willing to pay for.  It's therefore their duty to establish criteria for which ads are going to show up -- and one of those criteria should surely be whether it's the truth.

The alternative is that our government will continue to be run by whoever has the cleverest, most attractive propaganda.  And as we've seen over the past three years, this is surely a recipe for disaster.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun book about math.

Bet that's a phrase you've hardly ever heard uttered.

Jordan Ellenberg's amazing How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking looks at how critical it is for people to have a basic understanding and appreciation for math -- and how misunderstandings can lead to profound errors in decision-making.  Ellenberg takes us on a fantastic trip through dozens of disparate realms -- baseball, crime and punishment, politics, psychology, artificial languages, and social media, to name a few -- and how in each, a comprehension of math leads you to a deeper understanding of the world.

As he puts it: math is "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength."  Which is certainly something that is drastically needed lately.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Water-tight compartments in the brain

Today's topic is compartmentalization, a psychological phenomenon that is defined thus:

Compartmentalization is an unconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid cognitive dissonance, or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a person's having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves.

Compartmentalization allows these conflicting ideas to co-exist by inhibiting direct or explicit acknowledgement and interaction between separate compartmentalized self states.  [Source]

While I'm sure that we all engage in this defense mechanism to one extent or another, in more extreme cases it does result in stances that (from the outside) look completely ludicrous.  It explains, for example, two of my former students, both brilliantly successful in my AP Biology class, both of whom were Young-Earth Creationists.  One of them, when I asked how she could accept the rest of science and reject evolutionary biology, answered -- without any apparent rancor -- that the rest of science was just fine, and she believed it to be true, but when science and Christianity conflict then the science has to be wrong, because she knew that the bible is true.  The other student seemed more conflicted about the whole thing, but ended up with basically the same solution.

One of these students, by the way, is now a medical doctor, and the other an environmental lawyer.

The whole subject of compartmentalization is on my mind today because of something that President Obama said this week with regard to climate change.  In a speech given at Georgetown University (excerpted and reviewed here), Obama stated that the United States needs to develop and implement a comprehensive plan to manage anthropogenic climate change, and outlined steps that he believes would accomplish what needs to be done.  About climate change deniers, he had the following to say: "I am willing to work with anybody…to combat this threat on behalf of our kids.  But I don't have much patience for anybody who argues the problem is not real.  We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat-Earth Society.  Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm."

Which is a pretty good line... but, unfortunately, generated a response from the Daniel Shenton, president of the Flat-Earth Society, who said that actually, he believes in anthropogenic climate change.

"I accept that climate change is a process which has been ongoing since beginning of detectable history, but there seems to be a definite correlation between the recent increase in world-wide temperatures and man’s entry into the industrial age," Shenton said, in an email to Salon.  "If it’s a coincidence, it’s quite a remarkable one. We may have experienced a temperature increase even without our use of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, but I doubt it would be as dramatic as what we’re seeing now."

To which I can only respond: but you think the Earth is flat?  What the hell?

I mean, I've seen compartmentalized brains before, but Shenton may win the prize.

Not only does Shenton believe that the Earth is flat, but he believes that:

1)  Photographs from satellites are "digitally manipulated."  Why scientists are so desperate to convince people that the Earth is a sphere isn't certain, but they sure seem determined.  They're an evil bunch, those scientists.

2) The view of the Earth from space by the astronauts is explained by the fact that the space program is a lie, neatly tying up this nonsense with the Moon-landing-is-faked conspiracy theory nonsense.

3)  The seasons are caused because the Sun moves in circles over the North Pole (the center of the disk) and "shines down like a spotlight."  (Hey, don't yell at me.  I don't believe this stuff, I'm just telling you about it.)

4)  The Earth's gravity is created because the flat disk of the Earth is accelerating upwards at 9.8 m/s^2.  This acceleration, while it would create an apparent gravitational pull (consistent with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity), has as its cause a mysterious "aetheric wind."  Put a different way, they are making shit up.

 

Oh, but the rest of science is just fine, and we have no problem with accepting anthropogenic climate change.

I wish I was joking, here.  But these people, hard though this may be to believe, are completely serious.

The problem is, once you have your brain this compartmentalized, you become impossible to argue with.  Just like my long-ago student, anything that brings up an internal contradiction or logical flaw is immediately dismissed as simply wrong.  It's like the old joke, strikingly relevant here, about the man who thought that the Earth was a flat disk resting on the back of a giant turtle.

"What is the turtle standing on?" asked a friend.

"Another turtle," the man said.

"But what is that turtle standing on?" the friend persisted.

The man smiled.  "You can't catch me that way," he said.  "It's turtles all the way down."

I live in hope that one day, the water-tight compartments will begin to leak -- and that the resulting cognitive dissonance will require these folks to reevaluate their position.  But unfortunately, rationalism doesn't always win -- not with evolution, not with climate change, and not even with the Earth being an oblate spheroid.