Why Do People Believe Political Lies?
"The mob was fed lies," Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor two weeks after the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol, referring to claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Coming from the Senate’s top Republican, this was a striking admission. Even the president’s Attorney General, William Barr, had weighed in on December 1, telling the Associated Press that “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Over four dozen court cases found no evidence sufficient to support the president’s claim.
The lies continued with the president and some supportive lawmakers claiming that the January 6th mob was the work of Antifa, a left-wing protest group. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is reported to have told the president a few days later that “It’s not antifa, it’s MAGA. I know. I was there.” McCarthy later told the full House on January 13th: “Some say the riots were caused by antifa. There is absolutely no evidence of that, and conservatives should be the first to say so."
Yet the lies about the election and January 6th are widely believed. As late as December 11th, 68 percent of Republicans believed the election was stolen. Even 10 percent of Democrats and 25 percent of Independents agreed. In a recent poll, 58 percent of Republicans believed that Antifa was responsible for the Capitol mob’s actions.
Political lies are certainly not new. Machiavelli famously wrote about their use. Yet most of us have a built-in “lie detector” when it comes to our personal and social lives and hate to be lied to. So why do so many accept political lies?
A master of the political lie, Hitler offered one reason in Mein Kampf: people “more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie since they themselves often tell small lies but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Hitler counted on Germans’ vulnerability, adding further that even the “grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it,” - in modern language, ‘where there’s smoke there must be fire.’
Susceptibility to political lies may also result from another reason. The small lies in our lives rarely travel far, but political lies grow virally. In a study of the spread of true and false Twitter posts from 2006-2017, researchers at MIT reported that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news.” Novelty and the ability to provoke fear and disgust, they concluded, help explain these results.
In the case of the “stolen election” and Capitol riot, political partisanship clearly drives the tendency to believe lies. But Democrats are not immune. The tendency of people to join political groups and adopt their views leads to polarization in which the more extreme members pull everyone else in their direction. The tendency to ignore contrary facts, avoid or denounce potentially disconfirming sources and search for evidence to support existing views - confirmation bias – builds a psychological wall that deepens acceptance of lies. To question a possible lie also risks ostracism from the group, which often includes close social relationships. This is an emotional price few want to pay.
Partisanship also encourages moral licensing, the willingness to forgive immoral behavior because, “after all, he (or she) is a good person who’s done good things.” Democrats could forgive Bill Clinton for lying under oath about the Lewinsky affair because they liked him and his progressive policies. Evangelical Republicans could forgive Donald Trump’s lies because he appointed a lot of conservative judges. Rationalizing the liar’s behavior is a process we condemn, except when used by politicians we like.
The victims of political lies can also fall prey to gaslighting, a process in which the liar makes people question their perception, memory and/or judgment, leaving them open to accepting the gaslighter’s version of reality. Named after the 1944 film in which a husband manipulates his wife to doubt her perceptions and sanity so that he can commit her to an asylum, gaslighters use techniques common in the political playbook. They are all ways to control others to get them to accept the lie: denial of actual facts, diverting attention from other evidence, withholding or discounting relevant information, accusing others of lying, acting as if their approval of you depends on your acceptance of their “facts,” verbal abuse, providing alternate explanations for events, adding “facts” that never existed and, of course, denying they are lying.
Political lies won’t end. Our only defense is to improve our desire and ability to spot them. That means, at the least, developing skills to fact-check statements with neutral sources, searching for evidence to prove/disprove political statements, getting views from outside one’s circle of like-thinkers, and inviting others to challenge our most firmly held assumptions and conclusions. Doing so may be psychologically painful, but not more so than letting others govern us with lies.
Photo Credit: ashkan-forouzani-unsplash.com
