Why are people misinformed?
Fake news is a neologism to define media stories, headlines and reports that have no basis in fact, but are presented as being factually accurate (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). Some definitions of fake news characterize the phenomenon as intentional, aimed at misleading readers. Other definitions characterize fake news as designed to maximize traffic and profit. All variations include aspects of deception and falsity: the information is simply untrue.
“We are now in this post-truth age, where you take the facts you want and that’s going to be good enough.” —Carol Sanger, a legal historian and author (New York Magazine, 2017)
Fake news can distort the truth, decontextualize the truth, or simply fabricate information from the ether. These stories often have a "truthiness" to them, and are therefore compelling to click on. On Facebook, where there is a potential audience of 1.8 billion viewers, these links can have tremendous traction (The Guardian, 2016).
In an NPR segment of Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviews Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed about fake news. Silverman has spent years studying media inaccuracy and believes that "There's no question that these fake stories resonated with people. There's no question that they saw them and they shared them or they commented on them and they liked them, and that created tremendous velocity on Facebook. And a lot of people saw them, and that's a really surprising thing and it's a distressing thing." (NPR, 2016)
For women's health, the conception and dissemination of false information has been shown to have demonstrable, retrogressive effects.
"Bad information about women’s health — especially around sexual health, abortion, and reproductive care — has been making the world worse for women for years." (New York Magazine, 2017)
Now that we have a solid foundation of evidence-based information, we can begin to postulate how such a significant population of Americans came to be misinformed. As a psychology major I was inclined to seek an explanation through a lens of human behavior. In addition to political and sociological factors, what psychological mechanisms are involved in the development and maintenance of false belief? But first, Fake News.
2. Agenda Pushing and Propaganda
Social scientist William Biddle Propaganda relies less upon techniques which help the individual to come into intelligent control of his conduct, and more on techniques which induce the individual to follow non-rational emotional drives. The four principles followed in propaganda are: (1) rely on emotions, never argue; (2) cast propaganda into the pattern of "we" versus an "enemy"; (3) reach groups as well as individuals; (4) hide the propagandist as much as possible. (Biddle, 1931).
The propaganda model is a theory advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky which argues systemic biases in the mass media and seeks to explain them in terms of structural economic causes:
The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. (Herman & Chomsky, 2010).
"Each individual behaves as though his response were his own decision. Many individuals may be coerced to behave alike, each apparently guided by his own independent judgment" (Biddle, 1931).
But when we are being coerced, what kind of messages are we susceptible to?
4. Need For Cognitive Closure
The Need for Cognitive Closure (NFCC) has been explained as a "desire for a definite answer to a question, any firm answer, rather than uncertainty, confusion, or ambiguity" (Kruglanski, 1989). More importantly though, NFCC has been shown to "rise in conditions that render information processing difficult or unpleasant" (Kruglanski et al., 2002).
The topic of abortion is never pleasant nor easy, regardless of the side on which you stand. Applying this idea of social psychology to the issue of abortion: when humans desire a answer to an uncomfortable question, it is likely that they latch onto the most convenient answer available, spending as little time as necessary to form an opinion. In an ideal world, everyone would do extensive research and acquire new knowledge to form conclusions, ideas, and opinions. But because of the discomfort that surrounds a topic such as abortion, there is often an urgency to take a side hastily. And since permanence is central to the motivation for cognitive closure, individuals feel compelled to form conclusions prematurely and then stick to them.
1. Fake News
Once opinions are formed, they're hard to change.
Returning back to the NPR segment I mentioned at the beginning of this section, Craig Silverman explains that once fake news enters our news feed and permeates our cognition, it's very hard to reverse its psychological impact.
"There's some emotional resistance to wanting to be wrong. That's a very natural human thing. And [debunkings] are just not as shareable because the emotion there isn't as real and raw as something that makes you angry, for example." NPR
The "debunkings" Silverman mentions refer to the attempt to correct or expose fake news websites as false. He explains that people don't like to feel wrong, so they remain attached to the emotional, yet false news piece that first won their attention. More so, these initial exposures and "resistance to wanting to be wrong" turn into belief. And belief turns into dogma. And dogma turns into prejudice and intolerance.
A study published in the British Journal of Psychology demonstrated that "dogmatic beliefs mediate the relationship between intolerance to uncertainty and both, religious orthodoxy and dogmatic atheism"(Kossowska, Czernatowicz‐Kukuczka & Sekerdej, 2016). The study also showed that prejudice towards groups that violate in-group values is especially strong under experimentally induced uncertainty.
And it comes full circle. The uncertainty and lack of knowledge associated with reporductive rights actually fuels the negative emotion towards the topic.
7. Dogmatism
"A world in which baseless claims, unhinged from facts or demonstrable reality, can pass for truth." New York Magazine
Moral exporting is o actively promote one’s own personal moral values to others
When confronted with discrepancies between what one strongly believes in and what someone else believes (or how he or she acts), an individual has several options in how to deal with the situation. Because of natural biases toward the self (e.g., Baumeister, 1998; Greenwald, 1980) and the ingroup from which a person’s beliefs often originate (e.g., Tajfel & Turner, 1986), there is a strong tendency for individuals to consider their own point of view as more correct (egocentric bias). The mere presence of a conflicting point of view, however, may make one’s own convictions more vulnerable to uncertainty (Festinger, 1954; Greenberg et al., 1990; van den Bos, Euwema, Poortvliet, & Maas, 2007)."
if one’s tolerance for uncertainty has exceeded some threshold, or if there is a fundamental commitment to the beliefs in question, then it becomes increasingly unlikely that this discrepancy will be ignored. Beyond simply dismissing their views, one means of reducing uncertainty may be attempting to convince non-adherents of the validity of one’s own views. By achieving further consensus on what moral beliefs and behaviors are valid, one eliminates the uncertainty that is implied in moral diversity while at the same time affirming one’s own beliefs (Festinger, 1954)."(Peterson et al., 2009).
In this case, the individual is not only uncomfortable with the uncertainty that results from others holding different views of morality and therefore motivated to engage in strategies to change the others’ beliefs; rather, since such beliefs help to answer the ultimate questions of ‘‘right and wrong’’ and ‘‘good and evil’’, they may in fact feel compelled to perform this role (i.e., to ‘‘save’’ the ‘‘souls’’ of others).(Peterson et al., 2009).
"In two studies and with respect to two widely different samples, we found support for the hypothesis that political conservatism would be associated with a willingness to endorse the belief that it is acceptable (and possibly even obligatory) to actively promote one’s own personal moral values to others, a belief we have termed moral exporting (ME). We also found support for the idea that conservatives’ stronger endorsement of ME is at least partly due to epistemic concerns, namely, political conservatives’ tendencies to think of morality in absolute terms relative to political liberals (above and beyond a more general need for cognitive closure; Jost et al., 2003)" (Peterson et al., 2009).
5. Emotional Bias
One of the factors that contributes to someone's opinion of abortion, and therefore Planned Parenthood, is the associated visceral emotion.
A meta-analytic review by psychologists at The University of Oklahoma found that discrete emotions have moderate to large effects on judgement and decision-making outcomes (Angie, Connelly, Waples & Kligyte, 2011). As opposed to affect, discrete emotions describe specific feeling states that arise from stimulus events (Frijda, 1986) and tend to be short-lived and intense (Clore et al., 1994).
With a large body of research supporting the idea that emotions affect our decisions, emotional bias suggests a distortion in cognition and decision making due to the type of emotional reaction. The controversies and news stories that surround Planned Parenthood often involve abortion. People attach negative emotion to abortion and this emotional bias affects their opinion on the organization. This negative emotional bias would cause a individual to be reluctant to support an organization associated with issues that are unpleasant.
Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Herbert A. Simon won the Nobel prize for his theory that people are cognitive misers. That is, in a society of mass information, people are forced to make decisions quickly and often superficially, as opposed to logically." (Stanovich, 2009).
In psychology, the human mind is considered to be a cognitive miser due to the tendency of humans to think and solve problems in simpler and less effortful ways rather than in more sophisticated and more effortful ways, regardless of intelligence.[1] Just as a miser seeks to avoid spending money, the human mind often seeks to avoid spending computational effort. The cognitive miser theory is an umbrella theory of cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attributional biases to explain how and why people are cognitive misers.[2][3]
The term cognitive miser was first introduced by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984. It is an important concept in social cognition theory and has been influential in other social sciences including but not exclusive to economics and political science.[2] (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Stanovich, 2009).
"It occurs when an individual has to make a judgment (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic attribute.[1] This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic intuitive judgment system, rather than the more self-aware reflective system. Hence, when someone tries to answer a difficult question, they may actually answer a related but different question, without realizing that a substitution has taken place." (Morewedge & Kahneman, 2010; Newell, Lagnado & Shanks, 2015).
“Kahneman and Frederick describe a trick that we cognitive misers use all the time in order to lighten our cognitive load. The trick is called attribute substitution, and it occurs when a person needs to assess attribute A but finds that assessing attribute B (which is correlated with A) is easier cognitively and so uses B instead. In simpler terms, attribute substitution amounts to substituting an easier question for a harder one.” (Stanovich, 2009)
It is possible that humans employ attribute substitution to make judgments about Planned Parenthood as an organization. As I have painfully discovered, evaluating Planned Parenthood is very cognitively expensive. One needs not only an understanding of the American political system, but also the economy (whatever THAT means), philosophical issues such as human rights and democracy, human biology, modern medicine, and so on and so forth. The web of knowledge necessary for understanding healthcare policy is virtually endless and impossibly intertwined.
So because an evaluation of Planned Parenthood is such a complex series of mental efforts, individuals substitute “abortion” for “Planned Parenthood.” It is more likely that someone would have an opinion on abortion, than they would have an opinion on Planned Parenthood. Instead of accruing information to make a rational judgment of Planned Parenthood, people conflate abortion with Planned Parenthood and make a judgment by shortcut. It is easier to use this heuristic than to devote the cognitive resources necessary to forming a well-informed opinion on the complex issue of sexual/reproductive healthcare as a whole.