“If you heard trump say “GOOD” about the kids being separated from their parents, and you STILL plan to vote for him, you’re inhuman” read the Facebook post by “Blue Tsunami,” who was just one of those reporting about Trump’s purported comment during the last presidential debate. The “news” spread quickly. One tweet alone was shared more than 11,000 times and garnered more than 50,000 likes. Yet the actual exchange among Biden, Trump and moderator Kristen Welker was this:
Welker: Let’s move on to the next section.
Biden: That’s right. And you — 525 kids not knowing where in God’s name they’re going to be and lost their parents.
Trump: Go ahead.
Clearly, Trump said “go ahead,” move on to the next question, not “good” about abandoned children. Yet tens of thousands believed the worst. No doubt few bothered to verify the charge against him. Such sloppy reporting, for which there is almost no penalty on social media, infects Americans eager to express righteous indignation. Where the falsehoods are intentional, Americans who post them join the ranks of foreign purveyors of disinformation.
After the election Trump’s backers became enraged by a report on Gateway Pundit that 2.7 million votes had been stolen due to faulty if not nefarious actions by Dominion Systems, a maker of voting machines. Here are a few lines from thegatewaypundit.com post:
“Then tonight we were led to a site on the Internet thedonald.win where someone who had seen our posts decided to do an analysis himself.
In the piece the author claims his work is a full list of votes switched from Trump to Biden or votes erased by Dominion (the vote machines used in many states across the US).
(The author claims that his work has been verified but we have not verified the results so we currently are labeling his results “unaudited.”)”
In short, Gateway Pundit is reporting on a site whose report it did not verify, hence its qualifiers. Trump retweeted a version of this charge to millions of followers and it went viral on other sites. It has since been reviewed and debunked, including by the federal government itself. Sloppy reporting and thinking are clearly bipartisan problems.
No doubt all those who cheered at the “evidence” in these reports were confirmed in their suspicions. That good feeling is one of the chief reasons why misinformation spreads. Being “right” is pleasurable, releases dopamine in the brain (the neurotransmitter linked to rewarding experiences) and sends us in search of more “proof” of our correctness.
Americans have gone too far down this path, but we can stop. The best way: refrain from spreading what we cannot verify. It’s no defense to say “I don’t know if what I’m sharing is true” because the act of sharing sanctions it and propels its spread.
Another step is to question why we believe such reports. There is a simple technique for doing so – the Ladder of Inference - devised by the late Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris.
Courtesy: authemticjoy.org
We act, Argyris says, based on our beliefs, but that’s at the top rung of our mental ladder and a long way from the data we encounter at the bottom. Between the data as a video might capture it (e.g. the Trump-Biden debate) and how we act are a lot of steps, each prone to thinking errors. Since our minds cannot hold all that data, we select some of it to process. To that, as we ascend the ladder, we add meaning, then make assumptions based on what the data mean and so on was we rise toward action.
A key learning from the “Ladder” is that the data we choose to base our actions on is shaped by our beliefs. In other words, it becomes easy to see only what we wish to see. Still another is that people often can’t agree or convince others they are wrong because they are not looking at the same facts or attaching the same meaning to them. This should signal the need for caution as well as humility when we hear a report we are anxious to believe.
There is only one way out of this thinking trap: go back down the ladder. On seeing a tantalizing report, we need to ask ourselves questions such as:
What are all the data on which my planned actions are based?
Do my beliefs affect what I am choosing to see?
Am I too willing to believe the report I got? What might I be missing?
What assumptions am I making? How could I test them?
Are my conclusions justified by all the data?
We cannot control what information people throw at us, but we can control how we respond. Bad information can be very damaging, with a staying power truth cannot easily reverse. Legions of Americans still believe Obama was not born in the U.S. and that COVID19 is the flu. Failure to think carefully is at the heart of Americans’ rush to judgment about issues and each other. Our best weapon to confront that resides between our ears.
Photo Credit: Dole777 - unsplash.com
