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