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In an ideal world, instant access to information on just about anything would be the final nail in the coffin of misperceptions. But that doesn’t quite account for the reality of things. With more information came more ways to spread misinformation, while social media allowed certain individuals with more unconventional ideas to unite in wide communities of like-minded internet users. We see this every day with the spread of conspiracy theories on politics, health or even science.
This success of misperceptions has been explored by many researchers, but most of them focus on a specific topic viewed from the United States. EU-funded DEBUNKER, supported by the European Research Council (ERC), is one of the first projects to compare different national environments leading to misperceptions. It brings together a unique combination of political scientists, psychologists, communication experts and economists, and it investigates issues as varied as immigration, vaccines, climate change and the political concept of fake news.
“An important starting point for this project was the work I previously did with Brendan Nyhan on the ‘backfire effect’. With this work we identified instances where giving corrective information to people appeared to cause them to hold on to their misperceptions even more strongly. Thankfully, we could show with this project that this is actually rare at community level, and that corrections are never useless at individual level,” explains Jason Reifler, ERC grantee and professor of Political Science at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom.
This is in line with another very recent study from the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Science’ (PNAS), United States, which shows how people greatly misperceive their ability to discern between true and false news. As Reifler notes, “DEBUNKER shows that overconfidence is associated with holding topical misperceptions, and that people who are overconfident visit more untrustworthy websites.”
How fake news was born
When asked about the project’s most important achievement so far, Reifler immediately mentions the project’s unique insight into the emergence of fake news. Not only does the research demonstrate the important consumption of fake news at individual level, but it also shows how this consumption is concentrated in a relatively small proportion of the population. And that’s not all.
“We haven’t found evidence that fake news consumption affected the outcome of the 2016 United States presidential election, though we also cannot completely rule out the possibility. However, politicians with prominent platforms – like Donald Trump – are capable of much broader and deeper dissemination of factually incorrect information than fake news websites. Similarly, an important project finding is that implying a conspiracy can engender conspiracy ideation just as much as explicitly claiming a conspiracy,” Reifler adds.
Fighting back
So how exactly can we tackle misperceptions? For Reifler, who cites the example of voter fraud claims following the United States elections, it’s a question of limiting supply and preventing the spread to wider segments of the population.
“Of course, we also need solutions when misperceptions do spread. We now know for a fact that providing corrective information does help. We also found that digital/media literacy interventions seem to have a positive effect and do not generate more mistrust as previously thought. Finally, we can get people to recognise their own failings in processing information and discerning accuracy. In our most recent PNAS paper, we find that nearly 90 % of the public overestimate their ability to differentiate between real and false news items. In essence, we need to create greater humility.”
On the social media front, Reifler finds the problem of echo chambers and filter bubbles to be exaggerated and says it applies only to a very small segment of the population. The bigger problem is likely that most people have lives to live and must make sacrifices about how informed they can be on most topics.
If the fact that people respond positively to corrective treatments is good news, Reifler insists it’s not all roses either. “The effects never erase misperceptions entirely, and they dissipate rather quickly. The big challenge is to find which tools and strategies may have longer-lasting effects.”