Transcriber: Marouchka Heijnen Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
Today, in the palm of your hand,
you have access to a world of information.
You can reach a multitude of new sources
and exchange your views with a wide range of people
all over the world.
This new reality should allow us to share a wisdom,
to communicate, to understand each other
and to become more understanding of our differences,
more tolerant of our differences.
But 2016 seems to have replaced the information age
with the post-truth era.
With Brexit and the Trump election,
we have found, we have discovered,
that more communication doesn't mean more information.
Let me show you what I mean.
Here is a picture of the Trump inauguration ceremony in 2017,
and the same picture of the Obama inauguration ceremony in 2009.
The White House declared that the Trump ceremony
had been the largest in history.
Did you know
that 28% of Trump supporters
said they believed there were as many people, if not more,
at the Trump ceremony.
30% said they didn't know. They were not sure.
And 41%, that is less than half,
said that they disagreed with the White House statement.
When you see these pictures, these views may seem crazy.
So how is it that people can believe something so clearly untrue?
But wait a minute,
Are you sure that you would never believe something so clearly untrue?
Think about it.
These pictures are not proof.
They could have been photoshopped.
They could have been swapped.
So when somebody raises these doubts to you,
you will have to use your own judgment
to weigh the evidence and make up your mind.
So now suppose that you were a Trump supporter.
Are you sure
that you would not give any credence
to somebody raising these doubts?
Are you sure that you would never entertain
that perhaps there were more people at the Trump ceremony,
and that these pictures are not proof?
Today, I want to put to you
that the cause of the fake news success lies primarily with us.
Fake news works
because we are willing to believe it.
And because we are willing to believe it, we lie to ourselves.
If we want a sound public debate,
we need to stop lying to ourselves when we engage with the news.
Let's consider an ideal public debate,
and think about it as a battle of ideas.
All ideas are voiced and debated.
A good idea is convincing, and it wins over less convincing ideas.
The philosopher Karl Popper
said that this process should lead public debate
to select the best ideas.
Unconvincing ideas disappear, and only the good ones survive.
And science seems like a perfect example
where public debate leads to selection of the best ideas.
With this view in mind,
the Internet should have a positive effect on public debate.
On the Internet, ideas are free to be voiced and criticized.
Good ideas should be able to convince more people and spread around,
and bad ideas are abandoned.
But when you look,
that's not necessarily what is happening on the Internet at the moment.
So why is that?
Well, perhaps, this view of the public debate is a bit unrealistic.
In 1949, Max Planck famously joked about this vision from Popper.
Max Planck was a theoretical physicist who eventually won a Nobel Prize.
He said,
"A new scientific truth doesn't triumph because it convinces its opponents;
rather, these opponents get old,
and eventually they die,
and they are replaced by a new generation of scientists."
And what Max Planck was alluding to with irony
was to the reality of debates with humans, us.
Us humans, we are not designed as perfect rational thinkers
only looking for the truth.
The fact is that often, we are attached to our ideas.
We can be attached to ideas
because some ideas may be convenient for us -
for interest.
So going to the example of the scientists of Max Planck,
these scientists may have become famous
because of the ideas that they proposed in the past,
and which are now old ideas.
Abandoning these ideas would be losing part of the credit they got
for proposing these ideas in the first place.
But it's not just in science.
If you think of politics,
if a government proposes to extend social welfare,
those who would receive social welfare
have an interest to believe it's good for the country.
And those who would have to pay for the social welfare
have an interest to think it's bad for the country,
it's a bad policy for the country.
But we are not just attached to ideas for material interests;
it's much more complex.
Often, we can be emotionally attached to our ideas.
They may be part of our identity.
So if I'm a Christian conservative or a left-wing liberal,
these ideas may be part of who I am.
Abandoning these ideas could be losing part of my identity.
As a consequence, we are attached to our ideas.
So we're not neutral judges
when we're considering the evidence for or against them.
On the contrary, science and behavior
show that we typically engage in self-deception,
which means that we are building beliefs which are compatible
with our interests and with our other beliefs.
Self-deception is subtle,
it takes place all the time in your everyday life.
So I'm going to give you two ways
in which self-deception can change what we believe in
and produce convenient views for ourselves.
First, when you receive some news,
you have some flexibility in how you consider it.
If it's positive news which is compatible with your beliefs,
you can accept it as positive evidence.
And if it's negative news,
you can to the contrary choose to discount it
and not choose to consider it.
Let me tell you about a study.
A group of people were asked about beliefs,
political beliefs and non-political beliefs.
For their political beliefs, they had to say
whether they believed in statements such as "Abortion should be legal" -
very loaded statements, typical of political statements.
And non-political beliefs were statements such as
"Second-hand smoking is dangerous to your health."
So what happened is
that these people were confronted with contradictions to these beliefs.
What do you think people did?
How did they react when they were confronted with these contradictions?
Well, here's how people reacted with their non-political beliefs.
So you have the strength of their beliefs before the contradiction and after it.
So when faced with a series of contradictions,
they updated their beliefs
and the strength of their beliefs was lower after facing contradictions.
But now look at what happened
when they were faced with contradictions to their political beliefs.
Here you can see that people resisted the contradiction much more
and held to their political beliefs.
That's one way we selectively interpret the news.
But there is another way.
We're not just receiving the news; we're looking out for it.
We are selecting where we want to look for information.
And typically, we look for confirming information.
If you are a conservative,
you are more likely to read a conservative newspaper,
to watch a conservative news channel,
and perhaps even to turn off the TV or the radio
when a left-wing politician is being interviewed.
Let me show you a hypothetical scenario.
Let's say that you wake up in the morning and you open your newspaper,
and in one scenario,
you've got some news which is not good -
it's a contradiction to your beliefs.
Let's say that this news suggests that your favorite politician
is involved in a political scandal.
And consider the other situation, where to the contrary,
the news in the newspaper is positive - it goes with your usual beliefs.
Perhaps it's another politician, a politician you do not like,
who is involved in the political scandal.
Do you think, do you feel,
that you'd react in the same way to these two situations?
Well, research shows that you would not.
Most likely, what happens is that if you find a contradiction,
you tend to look for all the news sources.
You give yourself a chance to find something
which will contradict this negative news.
Perhaps another newspaper,
perhaps you will read the fine print in the newspaper
to make sure that the title was really reflecting the information.
On the contrary, if you have the positive news,
you're more likely to stop there,
you're more likely to be happy to consider that this piece of evidence
is enough for you to make up your mind on this issue.
So as much as we would like to think of ourselves as rational thinkers,
it is a fact that this tendency to look for confirming news
and to reject negative information is ingrained in us.
So now before you panic
and you think that our irrationality is making public debate impossible,
you can relax.
These bars have existed forever, way before social media.
So what's happening with social media
is that they are exacerbating some of the effects of these bars.
Let me give you two ways in which they are doing so.
First, on the Internet you have much more freedom
to look for the information which is convenient
to whatever beliefs you have.
The Internet is like a giant supermarket.
For any kind of idea,
you'll be able to find arguments for and supporting this idea.
Let's consider a crazy idea as an example.
Let's consider that you believe that the Earth is flat.
Well, 30 years ago, you would have been a bit alone
and maybe struggling to find people to give you evidence for this.
Today, you can just connect to the Internet,
contact the Flat Earth Society,
and this society is going to provide you with elements of evidence,
arguments in favor of your belief.
That's another way
in which the Internet helps you engage in self-deception,
that you can do it collectively.
You now have a multitude of communities on the Internet
that have created informational bubbles on their own.
In these bubbles, people select information,
interpret information, and repackage it
in a way that is compatible with the community's views.
When a new fact is discussed in this community,
the images which are positive for the community are reinforced,
and those which are not are dropped,
and the nuances are lost.
These communities build simple views
compatible with the beliefs of the community.
So the social media have not created a unified public space
where ideas are debated;
instead, social media have increased our ability to connect specifically
with the people whose views mostly match our own.
And whatever your views,
you can find a community of like-minded people
with whom you can share arguments supporting your existing beliefs
and not challenging them.
But what do you want?
Do you want a unified public space where ideas are debated, discussed,
and where maybe the best ideas can win,
or a compartmented public space
where different visions of the world can coexist unchallenged?
Well, if we want to defend and support
the existence of an open public space,
we need to realize that the problem starts with us,
with how we form opinions
and how we share them on the social media.
So perhaps, in the post-truth era we need some guidelines
about how to interact on the social media.
Here are three steps.
Step 1:
Avoid the narrow selection of information which closely match your views.
Make sure that in your timeline
you've got some news sources which challenge your view.
Try to find people with whom you disagree
and exchange with them.
Listen to what they have to say.
Try to appreciate the points that they may have.
Give them a chance to change your mind.
Point 2:
Question your views.
The more you'd like an idea to be true,
the more you need to distrust the way you made up your mind about it.
Are you sure that you considered
all the best counterarguments to the views you have?
that you've considered the possibility of weak points in your reasoning?
Try to find them.
Whenever you really want an idea to be true,
you may remember that at some point in your life,
we all liked to believe in Santa.
And even though we really wanted Santa to be true,
it didn't make it more real in the end.
So the more you'd like an idea to be true,
you need to be wondering, Is it too good to be true?
Do I believe this because I want to believe it
or because of the evidence?
Could it be another Santa for me?
Step 3:
Avoid contributing to the distortion of facts.
When you want to forward information on social media,
make sure you've read it, you understand it,
and avoid simplifying it in a way
which is going to conform with the views of the community.
Try not to contribute to an echo chamber effect
within the community of views you are participating in.
If you follow these guidelines, you are going to do yourself a favor:
you're going to stop building a convenient alternative reality;
you're going to avoid spreading half truths and distorted facts;
and you will limit the self-enforcing groups of confirming exchanges,
which are pushing people in different informational bubbles.
You will help ideas to be questioned and challenged,
and you will contribute to making the public space an open space
where the best ideas can win.
Will you allow yourself to change your views
and to abandon old ones?
Smart people change their mind.
Choose to be one.
(Applause)