Dr. Adam Berinsky: Political Rumors and Misinformation

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welcome to this week's episode of Critically Speaking, where we explore issues at the intersection of science and society, issues central to individual and societal health and well being. I'm your host, Therese Marko. There's so much unsubstantiated information floating around, especially in the social media and certain news outlets, that makes your head spin. There's so much it seems like many people just repeat and believe things without knowing if they're true or not. We hear this referred to by different names, rumors, misinformation, disinformation. Not everybody believes what they hear or read, but enough people do that society can be dramatically altered. Accepting things that aren't true can actually be dangerous. It undermines confidence in legitimate authorities. And as we've seen in the case of Stop the Steal, it can even incite violence. So where do these rumors come from and what purpose do they serve? And why do some people believe them and others don't? And ultimately, can something be done to curtail the spread of unsubstantiated information? Well, I came across a recent insightful book called Political why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight it by Professor Adam Barinski. Dr. Brinsky is the Mitsui professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab. For me, it was difficult to put this book down. Dr. Brinsky's experiments are so revealing about what political rumors are, and I thought I'd ask him to share with us today. So here he is. And welcome Adam.

Yeah, thank you for having me so

how did you get interested in this topic?

Yeah, it started as something of a lark about 15 years ago in the summer of 2009. I'd recently gotten tenure, was trying to figure out what to do as my next project, and I became really fascinated by what I call political rumors. So things about Obama's citizenship. You know, was he born in Kenya, was he born in Indonesia? You know, was he born in the US and questioning whether or not he was eligible to be president of the U.S. also, a lot of stories were going around then about the fact that there might be death panels in the Affordable Care Act. So this was the 2010 Affordable Care act, sometimes called Obamacare, that created sort of new health policies. And there were rumors that the government was going to create death panels that would tell people when and where it was time to end their life. And so I've been studying American politics and political behavior for my whole career. And you know, even for me, having seen a lot of crazy things, these were especially crazy. So I guess I started trying to investigate. I'm a political scientist, but I'm trained like a social psychologist. And so if I want to learn about something, I first do some surveys to figure out what do people think and then experiments to see can I change their mind. And so what I thought was going to be a, you know, a three to four year project became a 15 year project and one that I'm still working on today.

Right. In a book. So how do you define a rumor?

Yeah, so, you know, in the book I talk about sort of rumors as opposed to political misinformation. I think that it came about, I think, because I was very interested in the social transmission of these and sort of drawing on previous, previous scholars who had studied things like urban legends, rumors, conspiracy theories, had this field of psychology, rumor psychology. And so for me, just thinking about how can I apply these lessons into the modern political age. And so it was sort of by accident that I came across political rumors as the term. You know, if I were to start writing the book today, I might call it political misinformation. That's something that's sort of more in use in the general society. But I think that what comes down to is things that are claims that are made that are unsubstantiated by the balance of publicly available information. But what I mean by that is that claims are made without evidence and indeed in the absence of evidence. And also in thinking about rumors, the social aspect to me is very interesting, thinking about how these spread in previous eras by word of mouth. But today on social media, I can spread through these secondary networks.

Right, right. That's pretty powerful. So in your book, you talk about the information ecosystem. So I'm, you know, I'm a biologist and I think about ecosystems and biological terms. But what, how do you define an information ecosystem?

Yeah, so thinking about, basically, you know, thinking about the environment in which individual citizens, you know, so I'm a scholar of US Politics, but I also have interest in other countries. So I think, you know, for me, thinking about what is the state of the US Information ecosystem, think about how is it that people are getting their information kind of where they position. And so, you know, it can be through interpersonal relations. So a lot of work that was done in political science and communication had looked at how individuals would communicate face to face through conversation. But, you know, given the current situation, you know, thinking about how the Internet has changed, not just how people learn, but how people interact, thinking more broadly, the information ecosystem is, you know, basically how people are plugged into different centers of information. And so it could be a face to face content, but it could also be a virtual relationship online through a social network, or it could be the interaction with newspapers and other media that have an online content.

Right. So, you know, in a political context, I think you used the term weaponized mistruths. I love that term. What does that mean?

Yeah, so I mean, it's, you know, what's very interesting to me is thinking about, you know, as a political scientist, I often think about, you know, sort of what are the. Why are people doing what they're doing? You know, what sort of incentives do they have? And so I want to separate out how ordinary citizens think. So kind of thinking everyday people on the one hand and then politicians who are trying to score political gains on the other. And so when I think about, like a weaponized mistruth, it's something that a politician can spread that might benefit them and in fact become, you know, basically to them, becomes a benefit. So, you know, it's very hard to talk about political rumors and misinformation without talking about Donald Trump. But thinking about the reaction to the 2020 election, thinking about how there were a lot of unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud, Trump claiming that Biden stole the election. You know, there are stories about user ballots being miscast, ballots being counted wrong. Right. That these were things that there was no empirical evidence for. In fact, there was a lot of evidence that incidents of voter fraud in the US Are extremely rare. But yet. Right. This was Something that was not supported by the balance of publicly available information. Right. Is something that is a. A mistruth, but became a weapon for Trump and his allies to essentially try to stay in power.

Right. Yeah, that's a good example. What about other examples of weaponized rumors that circulated in the last decade or so? I mean, I already mentioned Obamacare and the death, Death panels. There are some others.

I think there's, you know, sort of. I think if we go back a little further, you know, thinking about 9, 11. Right. The question was, you know, did the US government participate in. So thinking also about, you know, sort of questions of. Can't. Right. Stop there. So I'd say that it's not just rumors on the right, though. It's also there are rumors on the left and thinking about mistruths that circulate. So, for instance, in 2004, George Bush won the electoral vote and won the popular vote, but had 100,000 votes flipped in Ohio, John Kerry would have won the electoral votes of Ohio, won the election, even though he would have lost the popular vote. So kind of an inverse of what happened in 2000 and what happened in 2016. And there's a lot of rumors going around Democratic circles. Essentially, the conspiracy theory was that George Bush won because of voter fraud, because Diebold, who is a donor to Bush, makes ATM machines. They also make voting machines. And these voting machines were used in Ohio. And so they kind of. The thought was that the election was stolen from Kerry because of this fraud in Ohio. So, you know, sort of all political stripes subscribe to these theories.

The electrical fraud, electoral fraud seems to be a popular one then.

Yes.

On either side. Yeah. Somebody who's not happy because they didn't win. So you used. It was really interesting to me, you used an experimental approach to measure rumor beliefs in the American public. Can you just give us, like, a brief example of how these surveys worked? What did you do?

Yeah, so, I mean, I think that there's, at the one level, you know, as I said, when I want to learn about, you know, what do people think? I run surveys. But, you know, it's often the case in today's partisan times that people might just want to say bad things about the other side. Right. So I ask you, you know, is Obama a citizen? No. Right. Is he from Mars? Yes. Right. You. Someone might be willing just to say anything bad about Obama. And so I was concerned about this because I wanted to separate out people just kind of saying bad things about the other side from genuine beliefs, kind of this genuine misinformation So I ran some surveys where I would essentially try to incentivize people to speak against their apparent interest and attempt to measure their true beliefs. So, you know, I might ask you, you know, if you're a Republican, I ask you, you know, do you think Obama is a Muslim? And then if you say yes, I say, oh, great, I have a whole bunch of questions that I want to ask you about that. Or we can just go to the end of the survey and I can pay you. Right. So essentially, if you want to say that Obama is a Muslim, you're paying a price, in essence, because you need to take a longer survey. And so the idea was that if, you know, sort of experimentally, if I varied this, where some people got this incentive and other people didn't, I can compare and see, you know, how do things change when I change the incentive? We take a survey, you know, so by and large, you're no better off at the beginning than you were at the end. But if I can, you know, just even a small incentive, so kind of getting you to the end of the survey and paying you the magic words, the survey vendors I work with would talk about would be get the full participation points, right? So basically, you get your frequent flyer miles or your points toward a gift certificate. And what I found is that doing that really didn't change there. So indeed, you know, even in the presence of an incentive, people say, yeah, I really think that this is true. And for me, that was important because I did want to separate out sort of just the general badmouthing of the other party from these factually inaccurate beliefs that some people held.

Right. That's an interesting way to go about it. So did your studies reveal anything about who tends to believe which rumors or conspiracy theories in general?

Yeah. So I asked a series of questions from across the board. Some that were targeted towards Republican politicians, some in policies, some that were targeted toward Democratic politicians and policies also wanted nonpartisan rumors. So did aliens land in New Mexico in the 1950s? That's a political rumor, but it doesn't implicate Democrats or Republicans. So what I found is that there's really two factors that determine whether or not people believe a specific rumor there. So one is general conspiratorial thinking. And this I measured in a number of ways. Psychologists have used a bunch of different measures, but the idea is basically to get like, how likely are you to believe conspiracy theories in general? And so what I always say is, you know, think about at Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukkah you know, the relative who you try to avoid because they always have some new story to tell you. It could be an uncle, crazy cousin. Right. So that's at one end. Right. These are people who are likely to believe lots of different things. At the other end, you have people who are skeptical of all sorts of conspiracy theories who are likely to reject that. So I kind of think about this as have a general likelihood of believing these stories. So that's one dimension. But the other dimension is, you know, because these are political rumors about political figures, that there's a huge partisan element there. So, you know, in political science, we talk a lot about partisan polarization. Where you stand depends on where you sit politically. And so Democrats are more likely to believe rumors about Republicans. Right. So that kind of the discussion about the 2004 election. Democrats are more likely to think that Bush stole the election than are Democrats, and Republicans are more likely to believe rumors about Democrats. But what's interesting is that these two factors come together. So there's an interactive effect there. So it's not all Republicans who think that Obama was not born in this country or that there's death panels, but Republicans who score high on this tendency for conspiratorial thinking. Those are the people who are likely to believe this. So kind of these two dimensions come together and we can predict, you know, based on the content of the rumor and your general propensity to believe rumors, we can learn a lot about whether or not you're likely to accept something or not.

Yeah, well, that. So those are the dynamics driving these beliefs. But you also mention the role of repetition of the rumor.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I think that there's, you know, sort of in psychology, there's sort of some studies that have looked at basically that, that as stuff. As information becomes more familiar, kind of more comfortable, people are more likely to believe this.

In other words, if they hear it a lot. Over and over and over again.

Exactly. Yes. Right. And so kind of through repetition. Right. Even, you know, even if I don't necessarily believe it immediately, you know, if it's. If I hear it enough, it's like, oh, that sounds familiar. Right. That's something that might be true. I think what's also important to remember in this is that, is that most people most of the time in this country don't pay a lot of attention to politics. You know, whenever I talk to a group or if I talk to my undergraduate students or I'm talking to a group of MIT alums or other professional groups, I always tell people it's like when you think about the process of how people think about politics, don't think about yourself. So anyone I'm talking to, and this true of your audience as well, these are. People are unusual in that they are interested in politics, but most people in this country pay only casual attention. And so in this case, repetition can play a role. So if it's something I haven't heard very often, if it's something I'm not paying very close attention to, you know, the fact that I might hear something several times might make me more likely to accept it. Not because it's true necessarily, but because it is more familiar.

Okay. That's sort of like why people put up a lot of. During an election, the more signs, you know, posters for a given candidate maybe has an influence on, well, people see that name all the time and they might vote for that person if they're not. If they don't really understand the issues and what the people represent. Right. Okay. So there's the repetition. Is there any difference in the quantity, the amount of political rumors spread by the right versus the left? Yeah.

So this is a great question in that we know that if we look at the general public, we know today, and this is not necessarily true in the past, and it wouldn't necessarily be true in the future, but we know that Republicans, so people in the public who identify with the Republican Party, registered Republicans, are more likely to believe rumors, believe more rumors than Democrats do. And so the question is, is this because there's something with how Republicans think about politics? Again, these are ordinary people. I don't think that that's the case. You know, I find in experiments that I've done and work that other folks have done, it seems that in general, Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to believe, or very closely so different pieces of misinformation that they're presented with.

But what about spreading the rumors?

Right. And so that's the difference here is when we think about what does the information ecosystem look like, you know, what is the balance of information out there? It's just that, you know, work that I've done, work that other people have done, had shown that Republican politicians today are more likely to spread and to spread a larger number of statements that are not substantiated by fact.

Right.

So thinking about misinformation or rumors. So it is the case that there's an imbalance in what people believe, not because people are thinking differently about politics, that Democrats and Republicans think differently, but because there is a big imbalance in the kinds of information that's out there. So, you know, basically, you know, people ask me about, you know, sort of does my work show that, you know, so that people are stupid and Republicans are especially stupid. I was like, no, that's the case. Right? That's not the case at all. Right. But what it shows is that Republican politicians, right, the people who are motivated to spread information are basically sort of doing a worse job of preventing the spread of misinformation. So I say if you want to blame someone, don't blame the mass public, blame the politicians. Blame the people who are making these statements and who are either countering them in the case of Democrats or basically kind of letting things stand, which was true, I think, for the long time in the Republican Party. So, you know, things about Obama's citizenship, right? This questions about the birther rumor. Was he born in this country? You know, you would have some Republican politicians who would stand up and say, no, this isn't true. So I think John McCain.

John McCain was great.

Yeah, Very great. But, you know, principles. Yeah, exactly. You know, sort of. But in terms of, you know, other politicians, you know, they had people like Trump, you know, Trump rose on the birther rumor, but he had other politicians who were essentially saying, like, ah, you know, everyone's entitled to their own opinion. So thinking about something that it's not a hard correction, right. It's not saying like, this is wrong, but there's no support for this. But saying like, well, maybe I don't believe this, but everyone can think what they want. And so I think together this creates a situation where you do get this

imbalance, a huge imbalance.

Imbalance, yeah.

Right. Nobody really challenges it. So you showed that among those exposed to political rumors that there are, correct me if I'm wrong, three different types of people with respect to how they respond when they hear a rumor.

Yeah. So I think, you know, I would say is that there's basically three. It's not so much that there's three different kinds of people, but there's three different kinds of responses. Right. In thinking about, you know, if I hear something in my surveys, I ask people, you know, I present them with a rumor. So, you know, do you think that Obama isn't. Is a citizen? And the answers I give them, they can say, yes, he is, can affirm the truth. They say, no, he isn't. So rejecting it, affirming a rumor, or say that they're not sure. Right. And so they kind of like, I'm not really sure what's going on there. And I think that this is really important to think about. This third kind of response or this third kind of person is that you have people who are not necessarily willing to accept rumors. They don't say, oh yes, I believe this, but they're not willing to reject it either. So in my surveys I did some follow up questions where after I would ask people, do you believe this or not? Or are you not sure? I would ask them, well, what did you hear that led you to your belief? So you're trying to get a poke a little deeper to figure out, you know, what's on their mind. And so for some people who said that they didn't know, they would say, like, I haven't heard about this, but there was a big chunk of people who I think were, I'd say it's a little more ambivalent, right? In that they would say, well, you know, that there's, I've heard lots of different things and essentially where there's smoke, there's fire. And so this gets at the question we talked about earlier about repetition, which is that basically, you know, if people hear things, it's not that they're willing to accept the rumor, but they're not necessarily willing to reject it. And I think it's really important to focus on these kinds of people and the kinds of answers that people say, oh, I'm not sure what I think.

Yeah.

So when I began this project, you know, I said, you know, early on I thought this would be a four to five year project that most of my projects were. I felt like, okay, I'm going to figure out what people believe, I'm going to figure out strategies to correct this misinformation and then I'm going to move on. And what I found is it's really hard to correct misinformation in that the people who say that they believe these rumors, by and large stick to them, right? Even, you know, even when presented with evidence, they don't necessarily give that up. But there's another kind of response, another kind of person, right? These not sure responses. So these people who don't accept the rumor, but they don't reject it either. And what I found is that the different techniques that I use, right, different ways to correct it really worked on these people. So, you know, I went into this project thinking it's going to be kind of like playing whack a mole, right? I find misinformation, I counter it with information. And what I found is that, you know, it's really hard to change people's Minds on this. People who believe these rumors, but focusing exclusively on them is the wrong strategy because there's this large group of folks, these kind of uncertain folks, these don't know respondents who you can move. And so I think kind of where I ended up was saying, you know, not that we should give up on the people who strongly believe rumors and misinformation, but we shouldn't focus all our efforts in trying to get them to change their minds. What we're leaving on the table is this large group of people that were able to move.

Right. No, that makes a lot of sense. So what do you think the difference is between why some people easily accept rumors and others flat out don't? Is that. Is there something in their personality profile or.

Yeah, no, I think that kind of this general tendency for conspiratorial thinking. So, you know, some psychologists as. There's lots of different ways that you can measure this concept of tendency for conspiratorial thinking. So some psychologists ask you 100 different, you know, conspiracy theories and say, well, how many of these do you believe? And the more you believe, the more likely you are to accept them. That's a very direct approach. I take a more indirect approach and I'm trying to measure some of the personality traits that underlie this. So I look at questions of dogmatic thinking. So do you see the world of black and white and also extreme political distrust, have distrust of authority? Do you think that there's folks who are conspiring against you? There's other, you know, sort of that. For me, as a political scientist, I'm most interested in the political angle. So I just want to get a measure of conspiratorial thinking, but that other folks have used other scales. But it all kind of comes to the same points that there are some people who are just seem to be wired to be more likely to accept these kinds of kind of fanciful thinking than others.

Right. But there is still a role of political partisanship. Right.

And accepting the rumor.

Yeah.

Right. And so, like, for me, you know, I guess that as a political scientist, you know, I want to. It's not that the. The personality part is uninteresting, but, you know, it's. I just need some measure of this. And there's. I could dive into the literature. There's lots of debate about the best way to measure this. For me, I just want to have some measure so that I can look at controlling for that. You have accounting for one's tendency to believe this kind of fanciful thinking. How does Politics play a role in there.

Right. So you also, in your book, you talked about the concept of self selection. What was that all about?

Yeah, I mean, so a lot of it gets back to question, how do people interact with the information environment today? And so it's the case that people can choose whether or not to pay attention to politics. And so there's some people who are political junkies, other people who pay no attention to politics. But even within that, there's the ability of people to select the kinds of things that they want to hear. Now, I've done another line of work looking at this question directly. What I think about is, you know, the question is, are people conservative because they watch Fox News or do they watch Fox News because they're conservative?

Right.

So the first is persuasion. That second is self selection. And the answer is a little of both. And so that, you know, I think that this is important when we think about is that people don't fully select what they listen to, but they play a large role in selecting where they get their information from, which is especially important in the modern day, you know, compared to when I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, and you had network television newscast every night and everyone watched them because there was nothing else on.

You know, so I had everyone watched the same thing.

Right. Because, you know, there was no other choice. You know, and then once people have, you know, given a choice, a lot of people decide, like, I don't want to watch news at all. I want to watch sports, I want to watch game shows. But among the people who want to watch news, they can choose, like, do you watch MSNBC if you're left leaning, or Fox News if you're right leaning. So people are able to kind of plug themselves in these particular environments, which does affect the kinds of things that they hear. But also I think it's important is that it's not just affecting what they hear, but they're actively seeking out a particular kind of information that can be especially dangerous if we're thinking about misinformation.

Yeah, no, clearly. So as an educator, I have to wonder about the role of educational background and the amount of relevant knowledge a person has so that they can critically evaluate what they're hearing or reading. So isn't that important?

Yeah, it is. But, you know, I think it's also the case, you know, when we think about, you know, in political science, a concept that we talk a lot about is political knowledge or political information. Basically, how much do you know about politics? How much do you. How much attention do you pay to politics? And sort of the irony is that the more attention you pay to politics, the more likely you are to listen to people on your own side. Right. So people who are better educated might have better skills to learn about politics, tend to follow the leaders that they agree with. And so what I found in the book, I look at this, I look at the rumor acceptance rate by political information levels, for example, so I compare Republicans who know a lot about politics to Republicans who don't know much about politics. And what I find is among Republicans, looking at the number of rumors about Democrats, that they'll accept that the more informed you are about politics, the more likely you are to accept rumors about Democrats as opposed to rejecting them. So, you know, we think overall, better educated people, more informed people, would be more likely to reject misinformation, but we find is that actually they're more attuned to the partisan angle of that information. And so in a way, you have kind of going into this, I thought, oh, the solution to misinformation is more information, and that not true. So in general, now it is true in specific cases. And so, you know, I think that's the case. But if we think about the role of education and kind of civic discourse more generally, I think it's just a lot more complicated than I thought it was going into the project.

Right. So it seems to me that, you know, a key could be understanding why some people easily accept rumors or false information as true. This could actually point to ways of preventing people from accepting ideas that are actually harmful to them in society. So what are some possible ways to mitigate the acceptance of false information?

Yeah, so there's some general. So in the book, I talk a lot about kind of specific strategies we can use to do this. And, you know, sort of one thing I talk about is basically the strategies we use to convey information need to be tailored to the kinds of people that we're talking to. And so, you know, I think it's. It was kind of assumed, again, this kind of the good info that you basically, you chase out bad information with good information. It was sort of assumed that, okay, if people, if people think that something is false, what you want to do is you want to counter it with expert information. Right. And so thinking about, you know, in the case of climate change, for example, this idea, people might be misinformed about the effect of human behavior on global warming. And so you counter, say, like, oh, we have some scientists here who study this. They're the experts. You should listen to them. And what we found is that people, if you say something to me that runs counter to my beliefs, I can either change my beliefs or I can change what I think about you and somebody that people, you know, the easier thing is just to change. I don't trust climate scientists now. Same thing with fact checkers that there was, you know, sort of when I began this project in 2009, 2010, there were a bunch of media organizations that were investing in fact checking. So kind of thinking about things like Washington Post, FactCheck.org, snopes, where you would have experts going through and saying, okay, you know, here's a rumor, we're going to do the research and see if this true or not. And you know, what I found is that this seemed to work a little bit for a while, but eventually it became the case that because there was more misinformation on the right than the left is that conservatives basically started thinking that fact checkers were biased. So essentially you're telling me I'm wrong. I'm not going to change what I think, I'm going to change what I think about you. And so in the book I talk about the importance of separating out the message and how we decide sort of what is the truth and what is the balance, what is supported by the evidence. We want to have experts do that. That's something that we want to have fact checkers checking stories, we want to have scientists researching the science. But these are not necessarily the people we want delivering the message. And so in the book I talk about the importance of separating the message from the messenger and being very creative about the kinds of people we have deliver the messages. So my book do experiments relating to death panel rumors. Right. Do you think that there are government run plans that will decide whether or not it's time for grandma or grandpa to go? Right. And so these are not true and we can have neutral authority. So the American Medical association saying these aren't true and those work a little bit. But what works better is having politicians who speak against their apparent interests. Right. So I had real quotes from real politicians. I had a Republican senator from Georgia, John Isaacson, who had co authored the provisions that were misinterpreted as death panel. Right. Essentially these were provisions related to end of life directives. And he said basically you might have heard that there's these death panels that's absolutely false. And what I found is that these were the most effective, not just for people who identified as Republican, but people who identify as Democrats and independents as well. It's the messenger speaking against their apparent interests. But so a politician who would benefit from belief in death panels. Right. So the Republican was opposed to the Affordable Care act, saying, this is just crap. Right. You can oppose this if you want, but this is just not true.

Right. Yeah. And then, but of course, they could be voted out of office the next time around, as we've seen people.

Yeah. So I mean, this is the, you know, sort of. Right. So, you know, when I present this around, I talk about my research. You know, people say, oh, we just need to have Republicans correct Republican misinformation. And I said, well, you know, this worked when I did my experiments. But, you know, Fast forward to 2021. You know, Liz Cheney, prominent Republican. Right. Daughter of the former vice president, you know, sort of had a high position in the Republican Party, said, you know, essentially that Donald Trump is saying that there was voter fraud, that the election was stolen. Right. This is just not true. And you know, again, there's two ways that people can react. Right. The first way is to say, oh, I believe, you know, sort of this is a trusted source. I'm going to change what I think. Or you can change what you think of the person, which is what happened to Liz Cheney.

Yeah, that's a great example.

And so. Right. Again, it's, you know, whenever I get talks to people, I said, like, I don't have a lot of happy stories right now. Say the same thing here. Right. There's no magic bullet. There's no solution that's going to fix this. And so what I take from this is not, oh, we should be giving up on corrections, but thinking like, okay, we need to be creative about the kinds of people we use to deliver our messages. And what worked for me when I did These experiments in 2010 and 2011, focusing on Republicans speaking against their parent interests might not work today. But that doesn't mean that the process is flawed. It just means we need to be more creative about thinking who can be effective messengers of that information.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. I thought as a scientist, for example, I would be, you know, a good messenger for things that were based in science. And I know a person who is absolutely convinced that vaccines cause autism and also that vaccines have fetal debris in them. So I've shown all the evidence to this person and he still clings to this belief. And when I ask him why, he says he just knows. So can we really change a person's belief in a rumor like that if they're so wedded to it, Even presented all the facts that discredit it.

Yeah, that is depressing. But it's a familiar story, right? The kind of people who are resistant in the face of evidence. I guess I'd say two things to that. One is, right, that even if people are strongly wedded to their beliefs, maybe information can weaken them a little. And so sort of down the line, there might be some effect there. That's a kind of optimistic story, but I think the more realistic story is maybe we shouldn't be focusing on these people who have these strongly held beliefs that we should be focusing on, not on the people who say that vaccines cause autism. There's fetal matter in this. I know this to be true. But the kinds of people are like, I'm not sure how I feel about vaccines. I've heard stories about vaccines causing different things like autism and focusing on these people who are unsure that they're not willing to necessarily accept these falsehoods about vaccines, but they're not willing to reject them either. So it's thinking about how we can focus our efforts on the groups of people that are movable. Right. I guess in some ways it's kind of a depressing, you know, place to end up is like, well, you know, some people believe some crazy things and there isn't much we can do about it. On the other hand, you know, sort of the positive side of that story is that there are people who have uncertainty or weakly held beliefs, and we can work with them to get them to reject these rumors and myths, truths. And so maybe that's what we should be focusing on.

Right. So in other words, we don't really necessarily deal with those people who are simply not receptive. They're not going to change their thoughts about vaccines, even if someone like me, a scientist, shows the data. And that's just it. So higher point away at. See, you know, there are facts that support things, and then there are people that don't that believe in things for which there's no facts. It kind of seems similar to religion. You know, there are no verifiable beliefs or facts to support certain religious beliefs. Right.

Yeah, it's a. It's true. You know, whenever people bring up religion. Well, you know, talk to sociologists, I think, but. But, you know, I don't want. And, But I think what's important is to, you know, sort of thinking about targeting that, you know, sort of by saying, I'm not saying we should give up on these people, but I'm just saying, you know, if we have limited resources, if we have sort of a limit to the effort. Like maybe we shouldn't be targeting these people as our primary mission. Which again, when I went into this project, that's what I thought I was going to be doing. I thought I'd be playing whack a mole with, you know, I find a misbelief, you know, whack it with evidence, move on to the next thing, but realizing that there are sort of people who we can affect and basically sort of putting our resources that we might have spent on trying to convince people to give up their unsupported beliefs. Now maybe our effort is better spent on trying to get these people who are not sure where they stand, because those are the people that we can move.

Right.

But it's kind of a depressing. Yeah, it's sort of, you know, at the end of the day it's sort of like, well, yeah, the people believe crazy things and that's how it is.

Yeah, well, I guess. But you know, it was interesting because you mentioned another study in your book where you had rumor believers and they were presented with unassailable facts, after which they accepted that the rumor was false. Then with time, they reverted to their original belief. So what's that all about mean? Did they forget or what happened?

Yeah, no, I mean, this is, you know, this is, you're thinking about, you know, a lot of the experiments we run in political science. You know, we get people not in an actual lab, a virtual lab where, you know, I have you paying attention and I find I can move your beliefs. But then you leave the lab, you leave the environment that I control where the information and you interact with the real world and there's all sorts of things floating around. So, you know, it could be that things fade because people forget. It could be that things fade because they encounter more misinformation there. So, you know, I found this, that over two weeks, you know, about half of the effects of my kind of my information treatments that would fade. But we saw this also in the real world. So, you know, story that I tell in the book is about Obama's birth certificate that we, you know, sort of throughout 2009, 2010, there was a lot of talk about his birth certificate. Was it real, was it not? He released a computer generated version and a lot of his critics saying, let's see the real birth certificate, let's see, you know, sort of the long form birth certificate. And in April 2011, he released the actual image of the birth certificate and found that, you know, that people's minds did change, right? So that the percentage of people who said that Obama was born in the US increased right after the release of the birth certificate. And so, you know, sort of thinking, a lot of people say like, ah, right, we solved the problem, mission accomplished, we can go home. But you know, I did some follow up surveys, you know, six months later, nine months later, 12 months later, we. What I found is that, you know, looking at this real world example where, you know, there was this intervention, Obama released his birth certificate and got a lot of media attention. Over time, you know, things faded and we were back where we started, you know, again through some combination of, you know, sort of forgetting and encountering other information. So I think the important lesson from that is that we can't, you know, sort of, I say that we don't want to have one and done right in that. Now again, I keep coming back to whack a mole. So the sense of the mole pops up, you whack it with good information, but then it's going to come up again. So you can't just whack it once. You need to keep whacking and having a really thoughtful, deliberate strategy of countering misinformation that just recognizing again, a world in which most of the people, most of the time don't pay attention to politics, just correcting it once isn't going to stick.

Right.

Eventually things will fade.

Well, especially if they keep hearing the opposite on social media or wherever they're getting their information. Right. So a person will trust somebody, probably from their own partisan perspective. But doesn't this suggest that a politician should be held responsible for giving false information? I don't suppose there's any way to hold a person accountable, you know, or originating or whatever. But it just, it seems like it's kind of criminal, isn't it? They can't be.

Yeah, I guess this, I mean, so, you know, this gets to the, you know, so the conclusion of my book, I kind of go back and forth, I was like, oh yeah, this is really depressing. It's like, well, maybe things aren't so bad, but they are depressing. And it's thinking about these political leaders for me that is the most troubling. You know, as you say that there is, you know, sort of political leaders can potentially gain from this information, you know, so that Trump certainly gained from, you know, spreading unsupported claims about whether or not the election was stolen kind of help build them up. And the question is, well, what can we do about that? Because the problem is that if, you know, sort of if we think about politicians as rational actors, right, in the sense that they tried to maximize their benefits from using different strategies. You know, if a misinformation strategy can sow doubt in one's opponent and there isn't a cost to pay, then a rational politician would do that. And so what we really need to do is to change the incentives. And how to do that, I'm not really sure. You know, it's not, you know, walking, watching how people react to sort of how other politicians react to misinformation. It's something that's changed over the course of my lifetime. You know, I remember back in 1988, Biden ran for president and he was accused of plagiarism in one of his speeches, and he left the race there. Right. So at time, I was like, if you found something wrong, corrected that politicians were basically assumed that, you know, if you are caught in some sort of malfeasance or some sort of mistruth that other politicians would sanction, you basically say, like, right. You know, but then, you know, Fast forward to 2016, and, you know, sort of now it's always striking to me if with Trump is, you know, just that basically I grew up in New York city in the 70s and 80s. I've watched Trump my whole life. And, you know, this is the kind of thing that he'd been doing back, you know, back when he was a real estate developer, is that basically, you know, say something that wasn't grounded in reality and then just kind of deny it. So one of the, you know, stories I talk about is, you know, in the 2016 election, you know, Trump said things like, you know, I think that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government. And then reporters asked him about that quote. He said, oh, I never said that, but you can run a videotape of him saying that. Right. And so, like, this is something that, you know, before 2016, like, if you had asked me, say, a politician does this, right. Says deny something that's on tape, I would say, well, their career is over. Because that were sort of the norms.

Yeah.

The times. And, you know, sort of things change. And so I think, you know, that what I would say is that we need to. Like, we need to somehow hold politicians accountable. But I don't know how that is.

Right.

And especially, you know, Trump has. Has shown a winning playbook for, you know, skirting accountability. So.

Yeah, that's amazing there. Yeah, it's, you know, he's got it down to a science, and, you know, people look back and they say, well, what happened to all the people that were eating the pets, the cats and the dogs? Well, people forget that really outrageous things.

Right. But just the lack of accountability and the, you know, sort of that basically, you know, I think that this is true in general kind of the norms surrounding how politicians deal with information that we thought and politicians themselves thought the world worked one way. It turns out it doesn't have to work that way. Right. You don't need to be held accountable. And so you need to be honest.

You can just be loud or whatever. And as you say, you know, fact checking, that should be very helpful. But then the fact checkers get accused of being biased. So it doesn't seem to work. Well, we could go on about this,

but I think, yeah, not a lot of happy stories.

Yeah, no, but I think, you know, that you're a really good thing that's encouraging that came out of your work is this idea of dealing with people who are still uncertain and can think about information anew in a new way and come to a more realistic conclusion. I think that's really important. Otherwise you're banging your head against the wall. Right. Talking to certain people because it's not going to do anything.

And I think that as a field we spend a lot of focus on that because it was, if you see sort of think about misinformation is something in the political system that needs to be dealt with. And so, you know, going in thinking, okay, let's deal head on misinformation, counter with facts. And then realizing that now some people just hold these beliefs strongly and there isn't anything you can do about that. So I always tell, you know, when I talk about different conspiracy theories with my students, I say, well, you know, go so Obama's birth certificate, for example. I show them the picture of the long form birth certificate. I say, you know, this looks good to me. But if you Google Obama birth certificate, you'll see people claim that twins born in the same hospital on the same day have a different looking birth certificate. The font was not in use in the early 60s when Obama was born. And so, you know, basically it becomes a moving target, I think for realizing rather than chasing that moving target, people who hold these beliefs, now let's focus on these people who, you know, maybe only casually pay attention to politics and they, they hear things, you know, that they're, you know, it's not that they seek out the information but you know, their friends talk about it, whether on, you know, social media or in person. And let's focus on those. Those folks because I do think that there is a lot of gain that we can make by focusing on these uncertain folks.

Folks, right? Yeah, they'd be the most receptive. Wow. Well, we've covered a lot of ground here today. And so, listeners, if you're interested in knowing more about Dr. Brinsky's work, I highly recommend his book, Political why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It. And also check out his other books on related topics. They're really interesting. So information about where to find his books or contact him will be in the show Notes for this episode. Well, I've learned so much from our discussion today and reading the book and I'm sure the listeners have as well. And Adam, thank you so much for sharing your results and your insights about this very menacing phenomenon.

Yeah, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. You know, as I said, I don't have a lot of happy stories, so your listeners are not going to find a happy ending there. But I think some that's really important to take this on head on and figure out what we can do.

Yeah, no, I agree completely. Thanks again. Thank you for your interest in our show. If you have any questions about the topics we've covered in previous episodes, please let us know through our website, criticallyspeaking.net and we can answer them in a subsequent episode. Also, if there are particular topics you'd like to hear more about or for the first time again, please send us a message through the website. And don't forget to rate us on Apple Podcasts because the more ratings we receive, the more people we can reach. And please stay safe.

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