Uneasy Truths

This story appeared in the Spring 2021 Letters & Science magazine.

The concept of truth has taken a massive beating over the past several years. Our political discourse on critical topics facing our nation—Who won the 2020 presidential election? Is climate change real? Can masks and social distancing help prevent the spread of COVID-19?—has been warped by rampant waves of disinformation, spread by social media platforms, manipulative politicians and a proliferating number of partisan news outlets.

“We’re in the middle of this toxic stew that leads a substantial portion of citizens to refuse to believe the plain and verifiable truth,” says Mike Wagner, a professor of journalism whose research sits at the intersection of media and politics.

While this modern truth-trashing phenomenon has accelerated over the past four years, it began four decades ago. Wagner pins it to the rise of conservative talk radio in the 1980s, led by pundits such as the late Rush Limbaugh. The rise of the conservative-leaning Fox News Network in the 1990s quickly became the second pillar.

“Both of these sources provided an alternative to mainstream news coverage, and both of these sources told their audiences that mainstream news coverage was not to be trusted,” Wagner explains. Fast-forward to today, where our social-media–driven world makes big lies and wild conspiracy theories easier to spread than carefully researched facts. It’s hard to imagine how we return to widespread trust of institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control, or longstanding news outlets with more than a century’s worth of adherence to rigorous standards of journalism and awards recognizing that rigor.

Through a range of disciplines that includes political science, journalism and philosophy, UW-Madison professors have been examining the issue and charting a way to return to a fact-based vision of the truth. Professor of Journalism Young Mie Kim has become a national expert in tracking the sources and impact of misleading targeted ad campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook, while Professor Sijia Yang has studied the elements that go into creating successful, fact-based health campaigns, a topic that’s only grown in importance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, philosophy professors Steven Nadler and Larry Shapiro have been examining how a wave of nonrigorous thinking has infected Americans.

Most experts agree that our access to and use of social media (primarily Facebook and Twitter) has been at the center of the disinformation storm, amplifying the ability of bad actors and uninformed citizens to spread wild conspiracy theories that sow division and influence the outcome of elections. Through her Project DATA (Digital Ad Tracking and Analysis), a research effort aimed at tracking the sources of targeted ad campaigns on digital platforms, including Facebook, Kim has been able to shine the light on election interference by both foreign and domestic groups.

In a recent “UW Now” town hall broadcast, Kim talked about the ways these misleading ads are designed to promote voter suppression and stoke anger among extremist groups. Her group’s findings have already convinced social media companies to step up monitoring and regulating political advertisements on their platforms.

“Disinformation campaigns feed on our vulnerabilities—our political/social divides, fear, lack of confidence in institutions like governments, courts and media,” says Kim. “And data-driven, algorithms-based, micro-targeted platforms amplify disinformation and its problems.”

Meanwhile, Wagner has led multiple research projects related to misinformation and the process by which people can be convinced to change their views and believe in facts. In a recently published study in the Journal of Communication, working with graduate student Jianing Li, Wagner discovered that the most important step for individuals is to admit you don’t know something.

Wagner and Li asked a group of participants questions about what they knew about 50 different issues, and how confident they were in their answers. They found that respondents who were misinformed and supremely confident about what they believed—think climate change deniers and those who believe the 2020 election was “stolen”—were not swayed by being given accurate information about the topic. Not being able to admit you’re unsure, in other words, makes you less susceptible to the truth.

“But when people are willing to admit they just don’t know the answer to something related to current affairs, they are way more likely to benefit from seeing news coverage about that issue or a fact check about that issue,” says Wagner.

In separate studies, Wagner examined other factors that might influence whether an individual is more likely to endorse a lie or conspiracy theory. Not surprisingly, it’s linked closely to the information environment. Individuals who “let the news come to them” in their social media feeds, rather than seek out and engage with diverse media sources in places other than social media, were the most likely to buy into bizarre conspiracy theories such as QAnon.

“It’s because they’re not staying informed and they’re not doing the work of being critical about some of what they see in their social media feeds,” Wagner explains. “People’s orientation toward their own responsibility as citizens can really influence the flow of conspiracy theories.”

So why is it that so many Americans keep choosing to subscribe to arguments and beliefs that are demonstrably false? It’s a question Nadler and Shapiro, the philosophy professors, have been considering for some time—in fact, they have even written a book about the subject that’s coming out later this year. It’s called Why Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us From Ourselves. According to the authors, the problem comes back to a question of evidence.

“By ‘bad thinking,’ we mean people forming beliefs in the absence of evidence, or the presence of evidence to the contrary, and then holding onto these beliefs when all evidence shows them to be false,” says Nadler. In the book, the two address a wide range of these people, from anti-vaxxers to school shooting deniers and, of course, those who refused—and continue to refuse—to accept the results of the 2020 election.

For Nadler and Shapiro, bad thinkers are guilty of both epistemic stubborn­ness—clinging to beliefs in the face of contrary evidence—and normative stubbornness. The latter term describes people who don’t just hold unsupported beliefs but take it a step further and act on them, like the rioters who stormed the Capitol.

As their book title suggests, both philosophers believe that their chosen discipline could hold the key to solving the problem.

“Philosophy teaches you about evi­dence and proper belief formation and responsible thinking,” says Nadler who, like Shapiro, would like to see students learn the basic principles of philosophy in both elementary and high school.

“Subjects like logic and critical thinking are no more complicated than other topics kids learn in their math classes,” says Shapiro. “You have an obligation as a citizen to educate yourself as to what constitutes a good reason and what constitutes a wise action.”