Fake News Seems Less Unethical When Weve Seen It Before

society is currently facing what the

world health organization calls

an infodemic of misinformation

we’re surrounded by fake news by

alternative facts

by a stream of falsehoods from business

and political leaders

this misinformation harms individuals

organizations society and undermines the

foundations

of democracy what can we do about it

well a lot of great research from social

scientists

and social media platforms have been

helping people distinguish between

what’s fake

and what’s fact but as a social

psychologist

who studies how people think about

morality my concern is that these

efforts

are insufficient because sometimes

people recognize that misinformation is

false

and they just don’t care take for

example

fake news articles that are

intentionally and verifiably false

and that could mislead readers

nationally representative survey data

from the u.s

and the uk suggests that between 14 and

17

of adults will admit to having shared

fake news on social media

knowing at the time it was fake

so at least some of the times some

people have little compunction

about spreading misinformation the

implication here is that to stop the

spread of misinformation

we need to do more than to understand

why people

believe it we also need to understand

why people excuse it so how do people

decide

whether misinformation is morally

permissible to spread

well today i want to talk about one

simple and scary

factor which is how familiar that

misinformation is

take for example the observation that

political leaders sometimes repeat

the same falsehood again and again and

again and again even hundreds of times

long after that falsehood has been

thoroughly and publicly

debunked when they do this the same

person is likely to

encounter that same falsehood more than

one time

or take the observation from research

that fake news can spread on social

media

faster and farther than real news

when fake news does go viral the same

person is likely to encounter

the same piece of fake news again and

again

and again what happens when the same

person encounters the same piece of

misinformation

multiple times well i conducted a series

of experiments testing the hypothesis

that fake news will seem less unethical

to spread

when people have seen it before even if

they don’t believe

the fake news why would this happen

well if you’ve encountered the same

piece of information multiple times

that piece of information will start to

feel familiar

and prior research suggests that if

information feels familiar

it will take on this quality that

comedian stephen colbert referred to as

truthiness truthiness is a gut

feeling that there’s something to that

piece of information

and the gut feeling is different than

what we believe

we can be incredibly confident in our

heads

that something is false and yet not be

able to shake the gut feeling that

there’s a ring of truthfulness to it

and i want to claim that that ring of

truthfulness informs our moral judgments

about misinformation

even when we know it’s false in other

words if we know that it’s false with

our heads

but we can’t shake the feeling that it’s

true in our guts

we might think that that piece of

misinformation is a little less

unethical to spread i tested this idea

in a bunch of experiments and i’ll show

you a couple of them today

this first experiment we recruited some

american participants online

and we showed them fake political news

that had actually circulated

on social media participants saw a

headline and a photograph

and half of these headlines are meant to

appeal to democrats and the other half

are meant to appeal to republicans turns

out it didn’t matter

whether the fake news appealed to

democrats or republicans we got the same

effects

for both political groups so we have 12

headlines at the beginning of the study

we

randomly select six headlines and show

them to participants

four times for each headline

participants fill out

a few different ratings of the headline

just as an excuse to get the headline in

front of them

then there’s a brief delay and four or

five minutes later

participants see all 12 headlines and

they rate

how ethical or unethical each one would

be to share on social media

now half of these headlines they’ve seen

at the very beginning of the study

and half of the headlines they’ve seen

for the first time

so we’re controlling whether the

headlines are familiar to participants

because they’ve seen them before

or whether they’re new now for all the

headlines we tell participants this

is fake news non-partisan fact-checking

websites have debunked

all this stuff none of it is real and

the results show that participants

believe

us they think that the the headlines are

completely fake

regardless of whether they’ve seen them

before so repeatedly encountering the

same headline

doesn’t make it seem truer but it does

make it seem

a little less unethical to spread so

here are the results for the question

where we ask people how ethical or

unethical it is to spread

this headline on social media and the

ratings are made on a 100 point scale

you’ll notice that i’ve truncated the

y-axis

this is good news because this means

that the average participant thought

it was pretty unethical to spread

blatantly false

misinformation but as you’ll see we were

able to push around

just how unethical they thought it was

participants thought

it was less unethical to share fake news

on social media

when they’d seen that fake news a few

minutes before

than when they were seeing it for the

first time so

repeatedly encountering the same fake

news article made it seem less unethical

to spread

and these moral judgments that people

make matter

we also found that if you’d seen a

headline a few minutes before

you thought it was less unethical to

spread and the less unethical you

thought it was to spread

the more likely you were to say that you

would share it yourself

on social media or express approval by

liking it

so the punchline of this and other

experiments is that fake news seems less

unethical to spread if you’ve seen it

before

even when you know that it’s false these

results suggest

a real dilemma that fact checkers face

if you want to debunk a false claim you

have to

repeat the false claim that is you have

to tell people what the falsehood is

that you’re debunking and even if that

debunking is successful

even if people no longer believe the

falsehood

well you you’ve now made the falsehood

familiar by repeating it

and if it feels familiar people may

think it’s a little less unethical

to spread so what can we do about this

well one promising solution

is to encourage people to think a little

bit more carefully

about the morality of sharing false

content

this is referred to as moral

deliberation essentially using your head

instead of your gut

to evaluate whether it’s right or wrong

to spread content that you know is false

some preliminary evidence for this idea

comes from a second experiment that i’ll

share with you today i recruited over

750 participants

online from the us and i put them

through the same procedure that i told

you about

a few minutes ago at the beginning of

the study people see

six fake news headlines after a brief

delay

they see 12 fake news headlines six of

which they saw a few minutes ago

and six of which they’re seeing for the

first time this time however

everyone is told just before they make

their final ratings

either to think carefully about their

moral judgments or

to use their guts more specifically we

randomly assigned

half the participants to read

instructions encouraging them to think a

little harder

about whether it’s ethical or unethical

to share content that’s false on social

media

we told them to ignore their gut

feelings and to write down

two reasons why they thought it was

ethical or unethical

to spread this information the other

half of participants

we randomly assigned to be encouraged to

use their guts

to make their moral judgments based on

their first instincts and not to provide

any sort of reasons why

they thought it was right or wrong so

here are the results once again

higher numbers on the y-axis indicate

that you think it’s more unethical to

share this content

let’s start with participants who were

encouraged to use their guts

in making their moral judgments here we

see the same effect

i showed you a few minutes ago that is

people think it’s less unethical to

share

fake news headlines that they know are

fake if they’ve seen the headlines a few

minutes before

than if they haven’t but when we

encourage people to use their

heads instead of their guts when we

encourage them to think a little bit

more carefully about their moral

judgments

this effect becomes smaller now people

think it’s pretty unethical

to share the fake news headlines

regardless of whether they’ve seen them

before

or not so the punch line here is that

repetition is making the headlines seem

less unethical to share but using moral

deliberation makes this effect

a little bit smaller now there is a

statistical caveat

we can be really confident that

repeatedly encountering the same piece

of fake news

makes it seem less unethical to spread

we can be a little less confident

that thinking hard eliminates this

effect

the reason is that we planned two

statistical analyses

one produced a statistically significant

result the other one

the result was not quite statistically

significant this means that before

getting too excited

about the idea that thinking hard makes

everything better

we would want to repeat this experiment

and see if we got the same results

so let me leave you with a few

conclusions

fighting misinformation requires doing

more than just trying to understand

why people believe it we also need to

understand

why people excuse it and my research

suggests that people are more likely to

excuse misinformation

even if they know that it’s false in

their heads if it

feels truthy in their guts now this

psychological tendency means

that we are vulnerable to manipulation

by people who want to spread

misinformation

to get off the hook for dishonesty these

people don’t need to convince

us that what they’re saying is true

all they need to do is repeat the same

falsehood again

and again and again there are two

important things we can do about this

now

a good first step is to recognize that

all of us are probably vulnerable

to letting people off the hook a little

bit more if they’ve repeated the same

falsehood

multiple times going further

i would encourage all of us to think a

little bit more carefully about our

moral values

before we share content on social media

that we know

is false more broadly as a society we

should realize that addressing our

current

infodemic of misinformation requires

doing more than convincing people that

misinformation

is factually false we need to encourage

people to think about whether spreading

misinformation

is morally wrong

you