Tweets and backfires

Let me ask you a hypothetical question.

You're over on Twitter, and you post a link making a political claim of some sort.  Shortly thereafter, you get responses demonstrating that the claim your link made is completely false.  Would you...

1. ... delete the tweet, apologize, and be more careful about what you post in the future?
2. ... shrug, say "Meh, whatever," and continue posting at the same frequency/with the same degree of care?
3. ... flip off the computer and afterward be more likely to post inflammatory and/or false claims?

I know this sounds like a setup, and it is, but seriously; why wouldn't everyone select answer #1?  As I discussed in a post just a few days ago, we all make mistakes, and we all hate the feeling of finding out we're in error.  So given that most animal species learn to avoid choices that lead to experiencing pain, why is the answer actually more commonly #3?

I'm not just making a wild claim up myself in order to have a topic to blog about.  The fact that most people increase their rate of promulgating disinformation after they've been caught at it is the subject of a paper that was presented last week at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems called, "Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment."  The title could pretty much function as the abstract; in an analysis of two thousand Twitter users who post political tweets, the researchers looked at likelihood of posting false information after having errors pointed out online, and found, amazingly enough, a positive correlation.

"We find causal evidence that being corrected decreases the quality, and increases the partisan slant and language toxicity, of the users’ subsequent retweets," the authors write.  "This suggests that being publicly corrected by another user shifts one's attention away from accuracy -- presenting an important challenge for social correction approaches."

"Challenge" isn't the right word; it's more like "tendency that's so frustrating it makes anyone sensible want to punch a wall."  The researchers, Mohsen Mosleh (of the University of Exeter) and Cameron Martel, Dean Eckles, and David Rand (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), have identified the twenty-first century iteration of the backfire effect -- a well-studied phenomenon showing that being proven wrong makes you double down on whatever your claim was.  But here, it apparently makes you not only double down on that claim, but on every other unfounded opinion you have.

In what universe does being proven wrong make you more confident?

I swear, sometimes I don't understand human psychology at all.  Yeah, I guess you could explain it by saying that someone who has a dearly-held belief questioned is more motivated in subsequent behavior by the insecurity they're experiencing than by any commitment to the truth, but it still makes no sense to me.  The times I've been caught out in an error, either here at Skeptophilia or elsewhere, were profoundly humbling and (on occasion) outright humiliating, and the result was (1) I apologized for my error, and (2) I was a hell of a lot more careful what I posted thereafter.

What I didn't do was to say "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."

This does pose a quandary.  Faced with a false claim on social media, do we contradict it?  I don't have the energy to go after every piece of fake news I see; I usually limit myself to posts that are explicitly racist, sexist, or homophobic, because I can't in good conscience let that kind of bullshit go unchallenged.  But what if the outcome is said racist, sexist, or homophobe being more likely to post such claims in the future?

Not exactly the result I'm looking for, right there.

So that's our discouraging piece of research for today.  I honestly don't know what to do about a tendency that is so fundamentally irrational.  Despite all of our science and technology, a lot of our behavior still seems to be caveman-level.  "Ogg say bad thing about me.  Me bash Ogg with big rock."

***********************************

Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

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

Tweets of fury

Every once in a while, someone will get a comeuppance so elegant, so beautiful, that it's almost like a work of performance art.

This happened to two of woo medicine's superstars this past week.  One of them, "Food Babe" (a.k.a. The Nitwit Formerly Known As Vani Hari), is a blogger whose criticisms of the food and pharmaceuticals industry are an amalgam of half-truth, fear-mongering, and outright quackery.  And this past week she posted a blog that was so outrageously absurd that it's to be hoped even her followers got a wake-up call.

I'd post actual excerpts, but she was ridiculed so roundly after this that she removed the post and all links and comments connected to it.  (It survived a while on Google's cache, but even that's expired at this point.)  But here are some bits from it that I recall:

• You shouldn't ride on jets.  Because jets contain compressed air, which will compress your organs.
• The aforementioned compressed air is bad for you because it's not 100% oxygen.  It is, if you can believe this, up to 50% nitrogen.
• Not only that, but because the air is pumped in from right outside the plane, it contains evil jet chemtrail exhaust.
• If you have to fly, you should choose a seat near the front, because pilots get the best air, and it gets progressively worse as you go back toward the tail section of the plane.
• If you're on a plane, you can get dehydrated, and this can give you headaches.  But you shouldn't take aspirin, you should take powdered willow bark instead.
• Once you land, you should make sure to ground yourself by standing barefoot on the grass. 

Well, you can imagine what the blogosphere and the Twitterverse did with all that.  And being the courageous, cutting-edge investigator she is, she retreated in disarray, but not before deleting every mention of the post she could find.

But even that's small potatoes compared to what happened to Dr. Oz this week.  Most of you probably know about this guy, who has become notorious for peddling every sort of alt-med woo out there, but who nonetheless has a bazillion loyal followers who will defend him tooth and nail if anyone criticizes him.  (In fact, I'm already girding my loins against the hate mail I will surely receive over this post.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Dr. Oz is a master of self-marketing, but this week he made a major "oops" move.  Not having learned from Bill Cosby's recent wince-inducing request that people make memes using his photograph, Dr. Oz posted a request of his own on Twitter... "What's your biggest question for me?  Reply with #OzsInbox and I'll reply to my favorites at DoctorOz.com."

Welp.  You can't just expect Twitter aficionados not to rise to that challenge.  Here is a selection of responses, none of which, I suspect, will be amongst Dr. Oz's "favorites:"

• Did you get all of your medical advice from a medieval alchemy book?  #OzsInbox
• When you were a boy, did you always want to be a snake-oil salesman, or did you have other ambitions too?  #OzsInbox
• #OzsInbox I've been vaccinated with raspberry ketones.  Am I going to get sick, or will I be immune to everything?
• Can you tell me the chemical name of one toxin my body produces that my liver and kidneys are incapable of handling?  #OzsInbox
• What kind of fruit juice do you recommend as an alternative to chemotherapy?  #OzsInbox
• So what is the BEST way to melt fat?  Stovetop?  Convection?  Microwave?  Or a good old-fashioned campfire?  #OzsInbox
• #OzsInbox Which Starbucks roast should I use for the most effective coffee enema?  I was thinking Sumatra, but Verona is so smooth.
• #OzsInbox Can transcendental meditation cure lying?
• I hear you wear silk scrubs.  If so, how do they feel, gently caressing your engorged ego?  #OzsInbox
• If I get cancer, how much baking soda should I use?  The whole box, or should I just keep going until I feel the cancer die?  #OzsInbox
• What has been your most profitable lie for money so far?  #OzsInbox
• I just read that my detox regimen may be toxic.  Can you recommend a way to detox my detoxification toxins? #OzsInbox
• I just got a flu shot.  When can I be expected to develop autism?  #OzsInbox

Yeah.  So that didn't work out so well.  Responses with that hashtag, most of them hostile, number in the hundreds of thousands and are still rising.

All of which I find heartening.  The fact that people recognize these self-made celebrities as the woo-peddlers they are is cause for optimism.  I can only hope though, that this makes at least a few of the true believers sit up at take notice.

And, perhaps, ask a few pointed questions of their own.