Filed with 60.3.13 - Conspiracy Thinking · Related: Conspiracy Theories · 60.10 Argumentation
Misinformation
Multiple things play into the propagation of misinformation, but it requires three basic elements.
- A person to spread the misinformation.
- A person who’s receptive to the misinformation.
- The misinformation itself.
Obviously, misinformation requires some agent to spread it and a person to hear it, as well as some misleading information itself.
Trust
Socially, lying is unacceptable for a variety of reasons. Primarily, I would say, lying is unacceptable because it causes us to lose trust in the messenger. And trust is essential in a community that only exists so long as we trust other people with our lives and well-being.
Trust is probably, then, the foundational fabric for civilization to exist. We cannot verify or fact-check every single part of society, so we offload that trust onto other people. This can be done in a variety of ways, but at the end of the day, all of it relies on you having some other person engage in some process that ensures the integrity of some particular thing.
Argument for Trust
Premise 1: Civilization is incredibly complex.
Premise 2: Humans do not have time to independently verify every complex thing in society.
Conclusion: For society to function, trust must exist.
Lying
Why would someone lie?
When you communicate information to a person, there is generally utility in the information we are communicating to the person. We are hoping to influence their actions either directly, through giving them a piece of information to act on immediately, or indirectly, through giving them something to consider that could change future actions. There is a reason we only talk to things that can listen to us, and not to things that can’t.
When someone lies, they are attempting to deliver you some piece of information that will change your thoughts and actions into things that will be beneficial to something that in their interests.
A good indication that someone is not lying is when someone gives you some piece of information that is not necessarily aligned with their interests, or, something that goes against their interests.
Do we prefer true things?
We generally prefer things that are true only because they offer some utility to us and allow us to either improve or enjoy our lives more. This is important to understand, because “improving your life” is not nearly as objective as people might think, and “feeling good” can be highly subjectively different from one person to the next, for example:
- Telling someone the optimal way to play through a game might significantly improve one person’s experience, as they can finish 100% of the game in a timely manner, whereas it could significantly degrade another person who wishes to explore or discover things on their own.
What about when telling someone a truth delivers negative news that makes them feel bad? If you tell someone they are dying of some illness, it is almost always going to be perceived negatively. Would we then not prefer to hear a lie as opposed to the truth?
The reason we prefer to hear the truth in these circumstances is because we know that, inevitably, we cannot run from the reality underlying the true statement. Eventually, the “truth will catch up with you,” and you will be forced to reckon with the prior statements being false.
If you were sitting in school and your entire family was killed in a car accident, would you want to know? Or simply have them disappear and never find out what happened to them? Clearly, you’d want some answers, otherwise you would be confused and distraught for the rest of your life wondering what happened, and you’d lack the ability to properly move on.
What if you were on your death bed, 5 minutes before they pull the plug, and your family was killed in a car accident? Would you want to know then, with nothing you could change about your life or act on? The answer is far, far less clear, with, arguably, no good reason for finding out this information unless you attach a normatively positive value to truth.
How do we know what’s true?
Generally, true things eventually reduce down to some physical phenomenon we can observe, either directly or indirectly.
“If you press this button, the radio will turn on” is something that can be immediately verified.
“If you eat this food, you will no longer be hungry” is something that can be immediately verified.
Some sort of feedback or verification mechanism is essential for determining the difference between true or false statements. Without the ability to discern truth from fiction, it’s possible to completely lose the ability to figure out what is true or false, leading to two bad outcomes:
- You could take steps in a direction that are contrary to your interests, and
- You could begin to trust agents that are liars.\
Who Spreads Misinformation?
If we accept the prior things as true, that communication is meant to shape the thoughts and actions of people, and that we prefer to hear things that are true, why would someone spread misinformation?
Someone lies to you when they think their fiction will shape your actions in a way more beneficial to their own agenda than if you’d known the truth.
Liars are people who are simply looking to gain some sort of advantage by shaping your thoughts and actions with a falsehood that moves you in a way the truth simply wouldn’t.
Who is Receptive to Misinformation?
Some people are more ready to receive misinformation because a lie, in some cases, makes the person feel better than the truth. One reason we tell ourselves lies is because it makes it easier to cope with bad things we’ve done in the past, or allows us to justify bad actions in the future, e.g.:
- “It wasn’t my fault I drove drunk, there was no other way to get home, so I couldn’t have avoided the DUI,” even if Uber or Lyft was available.
- “It wasn’t my fault I didn’t turn in my homework, I left my book at school, there was no way I could have gotten the reading from someone else,” even if a classmate was a phone call away.
In both of the above cases, it’s clearly a lie the individual has told to themselves, but why? Because it allows them to minimize a personal failing, which gives them more psychological comfort than confronting the poor behavior honestly.
What Misinformation Spreads Easily?
For us to evaluate a statement as being true or false, we need to have some way of verifying the authenticity of the statement. So false statements that are difficult to verify, as is the case with many grand conspiracies, spread incredibly easily, especially ones that reinforce our worldview, providing us a great deal of psychological comfort.
So then, what is Misinformation?
Misinformation happens when an individual communicates a fact, usually one that is difficult or impossible to verify, to a person who is not in a position to verify the authenticity of the statement who will then act in a way that benefits the liar. So the structure is quite simple, then:
- Discover some statement that is difficult to verify
- Find a way to profit from that lie
- Target an audience that will gain psychological comfort from the lie
We can generate a multitude of “misinformation” from these simple tenets:
“Some airplanes release chemicals into their cockpits that cause people to become agitated and aggressive, destroying social trust! Follow me and donate to help keep our program on the air so I can continue to update you with these devious schemes. Remember, the airlines don’t want you to know about this, because if you did, you’d stop flying with them and they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of you any longer.”
There are other factors at play, here, but these are probably the foundational building blocks. I might revisit later to flesh this out more.