So how do we decide whether something is true or not?
The media shapes what we believe about the world in powerful ways.
Think about climate change, COVID-19, immigration. Much of what we know about
these topics is communicated to us through the media. Through language, metaphors, narratives, images.
Billions of people now have access to online networks where they share news within the split of a second.
And a lot of that news isn't necessarily accurate.
So while once it took a news story to travel from person to person and city to city and maybe took weeks or months
for a rumour to travel, now people are exposed to lies and falsehoods
around the world within a matter of seconds and I think that's the power of social media
that we need to be carefully thinking about in terms of how to address this issue.
So how do we decide whether something is true or not.
One interesting mechanism that the brain
uses to decide whether or not something is true is something we call Fluency.
Fluency has to do with how familiar something is. So the more you hear something, the more it's repeated, the more
familiar it becomes and the more likely the brain is to think it's true because it uses fluency as a signal for truth.
So often when we talk about fake news and disinformation we talk about elections
you know has fake news disrupted the presidential election in the United States? Has it caused Brexit?
Those are very difficult questions to answer because we're looking for a direct causal link
between the news that people read and their voting behaviour, which is very complex.
But people often forget that there's also indirect consequences of the spread of fake news and one of those
indirect consequences is that it harms trust in democracy, trust in media and trust in institutions.
One of the biggest fake news campaigns of all time occurred during World War II. Nazi Germany printed
leaflets booklets there were paintings outside of shops cartoons and their whole education system
was geared towards brainwashing people. And lots of studies have documented the influence of
that campaign on how people think about other groups in society even until this present day.
So my own interest is in the psychology of persuasion and influence.
How do people become persuaded of information. And one day I was sitting in the library of the University
and I was reading an article from the 1960s by a psychologist named Bill Mcguire. And he
was writing about ways to actually help people resist influence when they don't want it.
And he was talking about how everyone's obsessed about influencing each other but in fact there's almost
no program of research that looks at how to help people resist unwanted attempts to persuade them.
So that's where my interest is, in helping people resist persuasion when they don't want it.
So our current measures often revolve around debunking and fact checking.
We're trying to undo the damage when it's already done.
And we know from lots of research in cognitive science that it's very
difficult to correct information once people have already been exposed to a falsehood and
this is what we call the continued influence of misinformation, once you're exposed to a falsehood
it settles in your memory, it makes friends with other things that you know to be true.
And people tend to retrieve false info from their memory even when they acknowledge a correction.
And so Prebunking, trying to preemptively protect people before that damage occurs is much more effective than debunking.
So what the media described as a psychological vaccine against fake news is really
based on the psychological theory of inoculation. So just as injecting yourself with a weakened dose
of a virus triggers the production of antibodies to help protect you from future infection,
you can do the same with information by preemptively injecting people with a severely
weakened dose of fake news or with an example of the techniques that are used to manipulate people,
people can build up cognitive antibodies or intellectual antibodies against misinformation
and become more resistant to it when they're targeted in the real world.
So to translate our theoretical findings into real world interventions such as the games that we've
developed we've teamed up with organisations, governments and social media companies around
the world. An example of which is Go Viral our intervention that helps people spot fake news
about COVID-19 which we developed together with the Cabinet Office here in the United Kingdom
and with assistance from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Verified
Campaign, who together helped identify audiences that are vulnerable to fake news about COVID-19
so that we can actually get this intervention out to those who need it the most.
One of the things we did was we teamed up with the gaming company and we created a game called Bad News. And Bad News is
a simulation. It simulates a social media feed and it gives users a taste of what it's like to spread
misinformation by engaging with weakened doses of the techniques that are used to deceive people.
And these techniques include things like polarization and conspiracy theories and impersonating other
people online like fake experts and what we found in our research is that when people go through
our interventions they become better at spotting fake news, they become more confident in their own their
ability to discern fact from fiction and they report to share less fake news with people in their network.
Now of course with any vaccine it wears off over time so when we follow up with
people month after month week after week what we find is that we can maintain a certain level
of immunity if people get regular booster shots.
But for me the ultimate benefit of the metaphor lies in herd immunity.
What we want to do is have enough people vaccinated so that misinformation
won't have a chance to spread in online networks and the way to do that is to actually try to find
out what level of vaccination coverage do we need at a psychological level and we can do that with
computer simulations for example to try to predict when herd immunity might emerge and what needs to
be done in order to achieve that.
So when we look to the future of disinformation and fake news, I think the viral analogy is helpful
Just as viruses mutate over time and become more infectious
and more harmful, the same is true for disinformation. The techniques are becoming more advanced.
The dark arts of manipulation are evolving.
So as Cambridge has informally dubbed me The Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher,
I can only quote my colleague from Harry Potter Professor Severus Snape when he said
"our defenses must therefore be as flexible and inventive as the arts that we seek to undo"