It's great to welcome to the program today. Cailin O'Connor, who's a philosopher and mathematician
as well as an associate
professor at UC Irvine and author of the book the misinformation age. Caitlin, it's so great
to talk to you today. Yeah, thanks for having me on David. So I think to start with, uh,
when we think about the way that misinformation spreads, I've read, uh, opinions or, or pieces
that say we need to think about it, almost like a virus spreads. Others who talk about,
uh, other sort of analogies that can be used when we just broadly start to think about
how misinformation spreads and we can include and misinformation actual fake news, not the
definition that the current president sometimes applies, but like actual fake news, um, conspiracy
theories fall under this whatever types of information we want to about what is the general
way we should be thinking about how these spread through society.
Yeah. So misinformation is such a broad topic and I should say some misinformation is not
like other misinformation. One useful way people have modeled this is literally using
models from epidemiology. So models intended to understand how literal viruses go from
person to person to person, like two people meet and then there's some chance the virus
spreads. So the analogy would be that two people meet and then there's some chance that
an idea or misinformation spreads from person to person. Um, part of the reason I think
this is so important to understand is that in the middle of this crisis of misinformation,
false belief, fake news, a lot of people have tried to understand, okay, what's what goes
wrong with human reasoning? You know, why? Why are humans so bad at figuring out what's
true about the world? And I think that a better perspective is to ask what kind of social
environments are we and how do these allow this kind of misinformation and false beliefs
to spread?
Yeah. Along those lines, the average person, when we hear something that we've either not
heard before and we have to assess the truth or falsity of it, or we hear something that
contradicts a preexisting belief, it seems that there's a number of levels on which we're
evaluating what we're hearing, and part of that is the content itself. Part of it is
the context and context of course includes some kind of assessment of the trustworthiness
of where we are hearing the information. Let's start with that piece first. What do we know
about how the average person is assessing what is considered trustworthy worthy as a
source, be it as an individual person or a news network. Republication what's the process
that we go through?
Yeah. Good. So there seemed to be a lot of things that go into people's assessment of
like, okay, I've heard from something from the source, do I trust that source? And some
of these things are really good things. So if someone has lied to us or misinformed us
before, we're less likely to trust them this time. And that's smart. Um, if we know that
some news source has a really good reputation, sometimes we're more likely to trust them
and that's smart. But then we also have all of these kind of psychological little tricks
and rules for how we trust people that don't necessarily do good things for us when it
comes to false belief. So for example, we just trust people who we judged to be more
like us. And that could be their, my same gender or race or they're also in my football
club. And those things don't actually guide us towards people who are better at sharing
falls or better at sharing true beliefs or helping us develop good beliefs.
Are there ways in which the understanding that we have and that institutions and corporations
and governments have in how we are making these assessments can sort of be used against
individuals to make them more likely to be to believe something that is not true.
Oh, so, um, people's understanding of these facts about our sort of social psychology
and the way we update beliefs. Yeah. So, uh, one thing that we should all understand is
that what we might call broadly propagandists. So people who have some stake in getting us
to believe something and who are trying to get us to believe things. And this could be
industry, it could be different government bodies, it could be political parties, it
could be Russian agents. Um, these influence groups often are very savvy to the ways in
which we are social learners. And our knowledge is deeply social. So if you look, just to
give an example at Russian disinformation, it's often designed to, you know, so they'll
design some meme in such a way that they know people are going to be sharing it from person
to person with those they trust and they know that what's going to happen is they're not
going to be the source of that information to others. Instead, everyone's going to see
it from someone who's their friend or their family member. And so they design it in a
way to take advantage of this fact that we tend to trust the people we know and love
and think are somehow similar to us.
That's interesting. So it seems that with that there's probably also some social status
component in terms of the people that are replicating the idea. Maybe, I mean, I can
imagine, you know, a simple example would be you happen to live in a part of the country
that has a significant anti-vaccine community as an example. And so merely for sort of social
acceptance and social status reasons, you become more likely to replicate those ideas.
Is that to some degree something you've observed?
Yeah, that's absolutely right. So many people call this conformity bias. So the underlying
psychological thing is that it's uncomfortable for people to stick out from the pack. We
like being like other people and as you pointed out, we in particular like to mimic or conform
with people who we consider to be high status, who have a lot of power or a lot of money,
or we think they're cool or we just really like them and everyone else likes them. Um,
and you also see a lot of misinformation campaigns taking advantage of that. So for example,
anti-vaxxers who get celebrities to scare everyone about vaccines are taking advantage
of this kind of bias towards conformity and especially the fact that we like to conform
with these high status people.
I get the sense that there's some feedback loop here between the spread of misinformation
and political polarization in the United States, but I'm not sure where the circle starts.
So if you look at for what, um, uh, Jonathan height has written about, he might argue that
the political polarization is coming as a sort of effect more than a cause in some of
these cycles. But I could sort of think about it either way. I mean, we could see that for
other reasons, there's more polarization and this primes people to be more likely to accept
misinformation. You could also think about the, about it the other way, which is that
for non political reasons, misinformation is spreading more easily, technological reasons,
social media, whatever. And that that therefore is increasing political polarization. Is it
a one way thing, one way or the other or is it more of a persistent feedback loop?
Okay. When it comes to polarization, I mean untangling this, not of what is happening
and why. I think it's really complicated. So one thing that, um, my coauthor and I argue
in the misinformation age and we sort of use mathematical models to do this, is that there
are different things that can cause polarization. So in some ways it's almost over determined
that you can get feedback loops based on social trust. So we don't trust people who have different
beliefs than us. And so once beliefs start pulling apart and these polarized communities,
we don't trust the evidence coming from them. They don't trust it coming from us. And suddenly
you have stable polarization. Conformity that I was talking about before can lead to polarization
too. We're all conforming and some click in a social network, other people are conforming
and because we have these different social pressures, we won't trust or we won't, um,
uptake the kind of information or ideas coming from another group. So that can cause polarization.
Just listening to different news sources so that you have different groups in a community,
just getting different sources of information can also cause polarization cause then they're
just not sharing ideas with each other. It's such a deep, complicated thing. And then as
you point out, there are these things where we see for example, Russian agents promoting
polarization in the U S but also taking advantage of all that anger and emotion and hatred to
spread their own stories. In a really effective way. I mean it's, yeah, as you point out it's
complicated.
How, uh, how important in all of this is individual psychology because some of what I've read
suggests that, you know, if you, you could look at studies that say, well a American
conservatives tend to have larger fear centers in their brains as an example, so that there's
actually something going on, um, at a, at the neurological level that might predispose
someone to be more or less likely to buy into or question beliefs or whatever the case may
be. In this broader context that you study misinformation, how relevant is individual
psychology?
Well, so there are so many parts of individual psychology, but the particular thing you're
talking about where there's some idea that I'm, yeah, conservative and liberals have
different genes or different emotional responses, I tend to think probably isn't that important
of an explanatory factor of things like polarization and belief. So you might call that almost
like a common cause explanation for ideology. Like there are certain types of people who
are going to be prone to different types of ideas. But I think if you look at what ideas
end up glomming into conservative and liberal, often they're really random. And what we argue
is that probably it has a lot more to do with our social psychology that holding certain
beliefs ends up being a symbol or a signal that you're part of a group and then these
beliefs end up glomming together and becoming part of a meaningful group identities. So
there are a bunch of beliefs that are part of conservative identity or part of a liberal
identity and it's more about group membership and maintaining that than about just having
been in neatly different to begin with is what we think.
What do we know about the most effective ways to disabuse people of false beliefs? If you
look at, for example, the work of Daniel Economen, he says, we might think that if you just beat
people over the head with the facts, they'll just see that their beliefs are wrong and
they'll change their mind. But in fact it sort of seems like the opposite often happens.
What does seem to be effective at getting people out of false beliefs?
Yeah. So it sort of depends on what kind of belief you're talking about because there's
so many different kinds of beliefs. So for some of them it is effective just to give
people the facts. Like if you are looking at a spider and you're like, Oh yeah, those
fighters are harmless. And I'm like, no, no. Trust me, I am a spider scientist. And that
is a poisonous spider is very easy to change your false beliefs. In that case. Um, that
belief isn't really tied into a lot of your ideology. It's not part of your core identity.
It's not part of your signals of in group membership and things like that. Other beliefs
like, uh, you know, um, regulating guns will save people's lives are much more tied into
people's group membership and identity. So polarized beliefs tend to be the ones that
get to be really hard to change.
One thing that seems to be effective is using these kind of little tricky trust rules we
all use to try to rehabilitate groups that have false beliefs. So if you look at some
groups that has high levels of anti-vaccine, um, so recently the Orthodox Jewish community
in Brooklyn has had high levels of [inaudible] saying just going in as a doctor who's not
part of that community, who people don't know, who they don't trust and saying like, look
dummies, here's all the evidence isn't going to be effective. But if you have someone who
is part of that community who could say like, look, we share a lot of values. I'm like,
you, I understand where you're coming from. Here's why I think you're wrong, can be much
more effective. So we need ways to communicate that advantage of the ways humans build trust
with each other, if that makes sense.
Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm imagining there are situations where it's hard to find someone
who's part of the group. I mean fundamentally sometimes you're dealing in conversations
that are happening only between people who are not part of the same group or are those
inherently the most difficult situations to make progress in?
Um, yeah, I mean it like if you are a part of two different groups and there isn't a
lot of shared trust, it can be extremely difficult to make progress and you know, get to someone.
I mean, one thing that I, as you were saying, like sometimes trying to have these conversations
or Sherman misses him or sorry, share information in this way with someone who has a bad belief
can actually go the opposite direction. It can push them away from the good belief and
push them away from you. Um, there's been some evidence that you know as much as you
can, if you can create trust connection, like a personal connection with someone, it's a
more effective way to spread information than like sending studies and yelling at people
and being like, you're, you're so dumb.
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting you mentioned that because I've interviewed a lot of former
extremists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, et cetera, and the trend about what eventually
pulled you out and what would have prevented you from getting sucked in in the first place
is people who expressed empathy towards me, people who connected with me, people who participated
in what would be called sort of a community with me, uh, would be the biggest kind of
like de radicalizing factor and seems to have been in there. Definitely seems to be something
analogous between that and what you're saying
[inaudible] [inaudible] yeah.
Uh, the book is the misinformation age. We've been speaking with the book's author, Cailin
O'Connor, who is an associate professor at UC Irvine, a. Caitlin, so great to talk to.
I really appreciate your time today.
And I'll just mention I have a coauthor James Owen Weatherall who's also here at UC Irvine.
Yes, a co author I should say. We never want to forget that two people wrote the book and
we will link to it with both author names, by the way, on our website at David pacman.com/recommendations.
Caitlin really appreciate your time today. Yeah. Thanks for talking with David,