The term gaslighting has seen a massive surge in use in recent years. The dictionary Merriam-Webster noted a 1,740% increase in searches for the term on its site, recently naming it their Word of the Year. Politicians accuse their opponents of gaslighting the public; the UK's leading racial justice think tank, The Runnymede Trust,  accuses mainstream media of being complicit in "racist gaslighting" and claims that lack of knowledge about female anatomy and health by healthcare professionals has led to the term “'medical gaslighting”.

Are we seeing the term used more widely simply because it happens to be trending, or does it reflect something deeper? Whilst in the past it was defined as a psychological manipulation tactic that leads victims to question their reality, the term has expanded beyond interpersonal relationships. We increasingly use it to name societal issues linked to misinformation, with some critics arguing that institutions and media manipulate public perceptions in ways that parallel personal gaslighting dynamics.

As scholars like Kate Abramson have noted, gaslighting not only undermines individual self-trust but also fosters dependence on distorted realities. Just as gaslighters manipulate their victims into doubting their perceptions, some critics argue that institutions wield misinformation to create an environment where questioning official narratives is considered irrational or conspiratorial. As journalist Jacob Siegel notes, the underlying philosophy of the war on disinformation is that

“you cannot be trusted with your own mind.”

This tactic is considered to gaslight the public by distorting reality, discouraging critical thinking, and fostering mistrust of dissenting voices.

To understand the full impact of gaslighting and the implications of how we use it today, we can see its origins in the 1938 play Gas Light, in which a husband manipulates his wife into doubting her sanity. We shall see how, over time, the concept of gaslighting has expanded beyond interpersonal relationships to describe how power structures manipulate reality to maintain control.

The provenance of the term

Despite the term being used since the play, gaslighting as a term was not the subject of theorising until Kate Abramson’s paper “Turning Up The Lights On Gaslighting.” Since then, researchers have published extensively on this topic, with broad agreement emerging on several of its key features.

First, denial and deception are critical elements of gaslighting. The gaslighter denies events or facts, leading the victim to doubt their recollection. Tactics such as minimisation and dismissal of feelings can make the victim feel as if they are responding irrationally, carried out over a period of time rather than as a specific incident.

Importantly, it works as the victim trusts the perpetrator; indeed, it can only work if the victim is predisposed to believe the gaslighter. You trust them when they claim you misinterpret things because they care for you or probably know better. It can seem to the victim that they ought to trust the one person who suggested their failings in the first place. Related to this is power; sociologist Paige Sweet points out that gaslighting depends on

“the mobilisation (or creation) of a power imbalance against the victim…controlling resources and narratives is key to how power imbalances are established and reproduced.”

In other words, the victim may succumb to the gaslighter as they may signal to the victim they should doubt themselves due to the superior resources they have access to. Victims are also typically isolated from supportive relationships by the perpetrator, not only reducing their opportunity to calibrate their feelings but also becoming ever more dependent on the gaslight for a sense of reality.

Together, these mechanisms lead to one of the most important characteristics of gaslighting, the way the victim’s self-trust and confidence in their own knowledge and beliefs (our epistemic autonomy) is damaged, leading the victim to have little confidence in their own perspective. The gas lighter is, in Abramson’s words:

“both trying to make her target think that she’s crazy and actually trying to drive her crazy.”

As such, Abrahams explains how the gas lighters desire to destroy the victim’s “independent, separate, deliberative perspective.”  In other words, the gas lighters aren't just trying to manipulate or lie; they aim to undermine the victim's capacity for epistemic autonomy completely.

Does this mean we all agree on what we mean by gaslighting?

As one of the seminal voices in gaslighting, Abramson's perspective matters. Her recent book, in which she challenges the notion of "structural gaslighting," has received much attention. She suggests that the term has risen in popularity, but it is essentially wrong: in her view, it is being confused with other forms of systematic oppression or institutional control. They may resemble gaslighting, but they do not share what she considers its core nature of something fundamentally interpersonal.

Abramson suggests that what is labelled as structural gaslighting is, in fact, better understood as other mechanisms of social control, such as propaganda, institutionalised discrimination, or cultural hegemony. By conflating these concepts, she argues, we risk diluting the specificity of gaslighting and undermining our ability to differentiate between various harmful dynamics. In addition, she warns against overextending the term, suggesting that such broad application risks “semantic bleaching,” where the term loses its original meaning and, with that, the power to address the specific wrongs it was meant to describe.

Challenging this is writer Sophie Lewis, who suggests the term has evolved into a descriptor for forms of “psychic domination” that arise from societal mechanisms. On this basis, gaslighting calls out the way that sexism, racism, or other forms of intimidation can undermine marginalised groups' sense of reality, leading them to question their experiences and perceptions, which is precisely what happens in interpersonal gaslighting.

She sets out how systemic forces — such as media, politicians, and governments — establish frameworks of knowledge and reality that gaslighting individuals draw upon. These power structures enforce dominant narratives, shaping the environments in which interpersonal gaslighting occurs.

An example is the disturbingly popular narrative (which we can see from polling data) that attempts to promote equality for all groups of people in their country have "gone too far". Drawing on Lewis' position, individuals can readily draw on these broader 'scripts' to legitimise their gaslighting comments. For example, telling a woman asking for salary equity that she is being unreasonable is given power and authority by drawing upon sexist agendas set by dominant voices, from politicians, media owners and think tanks.

Abramson’s position is that individuals, not systems, are responsible for gaslighting, so the responsibility lies with the person doing the gaslighting directly, not the structure itself. However, as noted previously, the boundary between ‘me and we’ is blurry and seems an artificial separation; societal mechanisms normalise certain narratives, facilitating people to enact the gaslighting. To presume we can separate individuals from the societal structures they operate in suggests a very atomistic view of people and their behaviour, which does not stand up to scrutiny, a perspective readily found in the works of leading thinkers, for Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu to Erving Goffman, and Judith Butler.

There is a clear case (albeit contested) that gaslighting has a structural component. However, to understand why the use of the term might be rising, we turn to another significant epistemic issue of our time: misinformation.

How gas lighting relates to misinformation

To explore this, we can use the recent example of the gross miscarriage of justice in prosecuting almost 1,000 sub-post managers accused of fraud, mismanagement, and theft. Two hundred thirty-six were imprisoned, and more had assets seized. As a result, hundreds lost jobs, reputations, financial security, and, in some cases, their lives to suicide.

The TV drama ‘Mr Bates versus the Post Office’, which brought the issue to wider public attention, opens with the stories of several sub-postmasters experiencing problems with the Horizon computer system and ringing the helpline, only to be told that the computer system was robust and that no one else was having problems. We now know that this was not true, and the helpline was effectively gaslighting sub-post managers into believing the issues with accounting were their fault. Jo Hamilton, one of the many sub-postmasters wrongly accused of theft, gave evidence at the Public Inquiry and said:

“After the court case I realised it wasn’t just me, it just makes you so angry. They gaslit me for about three years and pretty much turned me into a basket case.”

The Post Office's position, saying they found "no evidence" to suggest that convictions were unsafe, was, in fact, misinformation. The BBC established that Post Office managers already knew that a number of prosecutions might be unsafe due to known bugs in the system. This is surely a case in point that people are subject to institutional misinformation, in parallel to the case made concerning gaslighting by societal structures. Misinformation seems not to be a purely interpersonal phenomenon either.

Defining misinformation

A challenge we face is that despite the enormous amount of focus and funding misinformation has received, there is, as academic Magda Osman recently pointed out, much disagreement among researchers on what the term actually means. Some researchers define misinformation as false or inaccurate information; others emphasise the sender's intent, the receiver's perception, or the medium through which the information spreads. Furthermore, some definitions also make distinctions between misinformation and related concepts like disinformation (which involves intent to deceive).

Despite researchers' lack of agreement on defining misinformation, the general public's definition is more consistent. Osman found that the public tends to apply common criteria, such as misinformation being opinion presented as fact or assertions lacking evidence or being disproven by experts.

However, despite elements of the Post Office scandal being misinformation, using the term in this context arguably feels awkward. Why is this?

Who spreads misinformation?

Perhaps it feels awkward as for many within the research community, misinformation is often seen as fringe content delivered through social media. Many research projects on misinformation may not be designed in a way that examines how institutions such as the Post Office operate, despite the BBC finding that they had been perpetuating incorrect information.

Nevertheless, a great deal of research and commentary suggests that misinformation is far from a purely social media issue. For example, the Harvard Berkman Klein Center found that traditional media spreads misinformation about voter fraud more effectively than social media. They analysed allegations of voter mail-in fraud, which was a massive controversy in the 2020 US presidential election. The researchers found that this issue was part of a systematic campaign by a wide range of traditional media outlets. They concluded:

"Our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in, and the legitimacy of, the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media-led process. Social media played only a secondary role".

We could also make the same assertion in other areas: the war on Iraq was found to be based on misinformation, in part from the UK government, that the nation was preparing weapons of mass destruction, and a leading car manufacturer was found to be using misinformation to conceal its vehicles' exhaust emissions. We could go on. There is no shortage of examples of the way that powerful organisations wield misinformation to set agendas; it is not simply a matter of individuals with fringe views operating through social media accounts.

While this is relatively undisputed, much of the focus of misinformation research continues to imply the perpetrators are individuals (typically over social media, thereby amplifying their activity) or hostile foreign agents (e.g. bot farms) and not from our domestic societal institutions such as politicians, media bodies and business But this is not how the general public necessarily see it: research has found that while misinformation is often, in the minds of the UK public associated with social media (67%) and 'people holding extreme views' (56%), a significant proportion also cite structural sources: official government information (22%), newspapers (56%), politicians (53%) and businesses (39%).

It feels as if there is a case to be made for misinformation research to incorporate these structural elements better. Importantly, there is also a case for why this type of structural misinformation leads to gaslighting, which is where we now move.

How does structural misinformation lead to gaslighting?

As we saw earlier, a critical condition for gaslighting is placing our trust in the perpetrator: we are much more likely to trust institutions than someone we have met online. Of course, in some instances, we do – perhaps they have large followings, might have first-hand experience, or are highly articulate and convincing. But much of the misinformation research agenda appears disproportionately focused on this – supporting people to guard against drawing erroneous conclusions from information they see on social media that has a ‘truthiness’ about it. However, research published by Ofcom, interviewing people who hold ‘minority beliefs’ on climate change, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and health protection, were found to often have reasonably well-developed media literacy skills and a healthy scepticism of what they read online. There was no consistent sense of them having their epistemic self-trust undermined, one of the conditions of gaslighting.

On the other hand, we are much more likely to place trust in powerful institutions such as the government, media, businesses, and so on, with both trust and power being critical criteria for gaslighting. Hence, we might be worried if someone on social media is saying we are guilty of fraud, but we are unlikely to have our epistemic self-trust undermined. We would remain sure of ourselves. If, on the other hand, it is a large and powerful organisation that is challenging us, then we will not only be very concerned, but over time, it is understandable that anyone might start to question themselves. 

Commentators on institutional misinformation

The relationship between gaslighting and misinformation has not gone unnoticed by those sceptical about the nature of knowledge dynamics, such as journalist and writer Jacob Siegel. He suggests that the misinformation agenda has become a tool for maintaining control over public consciousness, much like gaslighting functions interpersonally, summed up in his words:

“If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind.”

In his view, state institutions have created an environment where questioning their misinformation narratives is seen as irrational, eerily paralleling the tactics of a gaslighter, who manipulates their victim into doubting their perceptions of reality. As an example, he cites the media's portrayal of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, where even legitimate inquiries were often dismissed as baseless conspiracy theories. The vague definition of misinformation is called upon here as the term is, in his words, “capable of explaining anything and everything yet simultaneously remained so ambiguous it could not be disproved.” He considers this undermined public trust in dissenting voices and discouraging critical thinking.

And related to this, according to writer Holly Buck, there is an overbearing fixation on disinformation that detracts from meaningful action on the ground. She writes about the relentless focus in the climate movement on combating misinformation that has the effect of overshadowing efforts to engage in solutions and mobilisation. This case reflects the structural gaslighting tactic of diverting attention from real problems, using a misinformation agenda to obscure more significant issues. So, just as gaslighting causes victims to doubt their reality, framing all debate as one centring around disinformation can lead the public not to see the urgent actions needed to address change effectively.

So, arguably, gaslighting is the result of large organisations wielding misinformation, although this begs another question. If we are being gaslit, are we really in a position to call it out?

Epistemic activism

Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.'s concept of epistemic activism focuses us on the role individuals and groups play in resisting knowledge systems that attempt to silence or distort their realities. Epistemic activism is the effort by marginalised individuals or communities to reclaim their voice, challenge dominant narratives, and highlight systems of epistemic oppression. Pohlhaus argues that gaslighting is a prime example of how systemic forces use their power to suppress knowledge and perpetuate inequality. Epistemic activism, therefore, becomes a form of resistance that not only contests these forces but also works to rebuild the agency of those who are gaslit or silenced.

In the case of the Post Office scandal, we could argue that the sub-postmasters engaged in epistemic activism by collectively challenging the institution's narrative, seeking to restore their own credibility and agency. External interventions—such as legal support, investigative journalism, advocacy groups, and political pressure—significantly boosted their success, effectively exposing the institutional gaslighting and amplifying their voices.

Pohlhaus’ view aligns here: epistemic activism often requires a combination of grassroots resistance and external validation to dismantle the entrenched systems that distort and oppress marginalised knowledge.

Should we be concerned?

While these mechanisms may be at play, to what extent does it matter? On the one hand, misinformation is often portrayed as a grave threat to society. But in separate papers, Zoe Adams and Sacha Altay, along with their colleagues, challenge this conventional view, arguing that the evidence for the widespread effects of misinformation is unclear and often overstated. The authors suggest that many speculated impacts lack empirical solid support.

However, while the broader effects of misinformation via social media might be contested, institutional misinformation—the deliberate dissemination of falsehoods by corporations, governments, and other powerful entities—presents a more straightforward case. From the infected blood scandal in the UK to the opioid crisis in North America, there are clear demonstrations of the impacts of institutional misinformation. These are cases where misinformation has not only misled the public but has also directly contributed to large numbers of deaths. While not all misinformation may have significant effects, there is clear evidence that institutional misinformation poses a demonstrable and deadly threat.

With this, we should look more closely at behavioural science as to date it has arguably been focused on tackling misinformation as a social media phenomenon whilst not paying enough attention to institutional misinformation. But even if there is a focus in this way, there is also a danger we will fail to to reflect on the discipline's own role in unwittingly supporting particular narratives: the focus on the way human deficits (crippled epistemologies) make us more vulnerable to misinformation could be leveraged in a gaslighting manner. 

And researchers at times seem to struggle to distinguish between individual and structural misinformation. A recent trenchant defence of the current state of misinformation research published in Nature suggested that criticism of the research on misinformation was misplaced and that a number of positions have been established beyond a reasonable doubt, about which false beliefs are widespread. However, what is perhaps not unpacked is the source of this misinformation: the inference is that misinformation creates unwitting victims through social media manipulation. However, the same considerations can be made as we saw for gaslighting: even when social media activity perpetuates certain misinformation narratives, people are not acting in a vacuum from the broader institutional misinformation agendas that may have greater influence.

In conclusion

We can see that the rise in the use of the term ‘gaslighting’ isn’t just a function of a passing whim—it reflects deeper shifts in how we understand the dynamics of power and control in society. While it was once viewed as a personal manipulation tactic, thinkers like Sophie Lewis argue that it now operates on a broader level, with people using it to describe how institutions manipulate perceptions in ways that mirror interpersonal gaslighting.

Our exploration of the increased use of the term rapidly connects us with the misinformation agenda – if we can think of individual and structural gaslighting, then surely the same applies to misinformation. And the implications go further: the rise in the use of the term gaslighting may well reflect in increase in the degree to which people feel they are being subject to and defending themselves against structural misinformation. Survey work suggests that people have a pretty clear eyed view of quite complex terms such as misinformation and how it operates. As Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Professor of political communication, put it recently:

“When it comes to the most serious misinformation, the calls tend to come from inside the house. Technology will not change that, so let’s stop gaslighting the public and admit clearly ... that misinformation often comes from the top.”

While this article has been focusing on unpacking the issues, we do need to initiate some discussion on what we should we be doing? Two considerations arise. First is for behavioural science to continue to address misinformation it surely must do more to extend beyond the focus on individuals and social media and consider in more detail how institutions play a role in perpetuating it. And develop a better understanding of the relationship between the activities we see undertaken at an individual level (e.g. on social media) and the more structural sources (e.g. politicians). By concentrating on individual actions, we risk ignoring the larger, systemic forces at play and risk becoming part of the problem.

Second, we could do more to explicitly link gaslighting to the misinformation agenda and bring in a better understanding of the way that populations resist and push back against dominant narratives. Supporting these activities through a greater use of Citizen Science can be explored, as this can act as a form of epistemic activism. By building people's confidence in their own capacity to critically evaluate information, this can counter the effects of gaslighting and more effectively challenge misinformation, whatever the source.

The world is at a momentous point with, over the next two years, around three billion people heading to the electoral polls across several economies, including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Whilst this number of countries having elections in this timeframe is not without historical precedent, a combination of factors such as geopolitical tensions, the ongoing cost of living crisis and the rise of right-wing populism mean these elections are widely considered to be particularly significant.

One theme that has also regularly cited is the potential impact that misinformation might have – a World Economic Forum report cites this as the most severe global risk anticipated over the next two years, suggesting that foreign and domestic actors alike will leverage misinformation to further widen societal and political divides. The report suggests that:

Resulting unrest could range from violent protests and hate crimes to civil confrontation and terrorism. Beyond elections, perceptions of reality are likely to also become more polarized, infiltrating the public discourse on issues ranging from public health to social justice.

There are however differing opinions on this issue.  One the one hand some claim that the implications of these misinformation campaigns could be profound, threatening democratic processes. On the other hand are those that consider these fears are understandable but overblown, pointing to research suggesting that while AI may result in more misinformation during elections, it will have little effect.

So what can we unpack from this – and can behavioural science throw some urgent clarity on the situation?

History of misinformation

As is well known, misinformation and disinformation (unintentional and intentional sharing of false information respectively) are not a recent phenomenon. There are documented examples as far back as Ancient Rome with Cicero spreading disinformation about Mark Antony's ethics in his speeches, influencing public opinion and political alliances during the turbulent electoral campaigns of the Roman Republic.

In 1950’s US, Senator Joseph McCarthy used lies and rumours to stoke fears of communist infiltration in the U.S. government. Whilst not directly linked to a single election, his tactics significantly influenced the political landscape, affecting voting behaviour in various elections during the era. In the UK days before the 1924 General Election in the UK, the Daily Mail published the "Zinoviev Letter," which purportedly showed a Soviet plan to support a British socialist revolution. The letter was later discredited, but it significantly impacted the election by damaging the reputation of the Labour Party.

So there is a long history of ‘dirty tricks’ around election time which existed long before current concerns about the role of social media amplifying misinformation. Nevertheless, we could argue that there is a danger AI could make misinformation more pervasive and persuasive, becoming more tailored and harder to spot.  Elizabeth Seger, a researcher at the Centre for the Governance of AI, suggests that highly-personalized AI-enabled targeting could be used to carry out mass persuasion campaigns.

The case for misinformation

So just what is the evidence that misinformation can influence voting intentions and behaviour? Zoe Adams, Magda Osman and colleagues recently reviewed the influence of misinformation, locating a range of papers that indicate its influence on outcomes. From this we can see how misinformation has been used to explain the rise in far-right platforms and religious extremism which then impacts voting behaviour, disengagement in political voting and intended voting behaviour.

They suggest that one of the most significant claimed effects of misinformation is that it leads voters towards supporting policies that are counter to their own interests, for example, the 2016 US election and Brexit vote in the UK. One study they cite indicates how the reporting of the 2016 US election reduced trust in media based on false news stories associated with both political parties.

Despite this, as the authors point out, the field is a difficult one to derive tangible evidence as there is as no consensus on how to accurately measure misinformation to establish its direct effects on democratic processes (e.g., election voting, public discourse on policies).

And there are strong arguments to support the counter position that misinformation in fact has little impact on outcomes. For example, in the US many voters have often made up their minds long before election day and as such seeing misinformation probably won’t change most voting behaviour. One paper published in Nature in 2023 found:

“no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign [in 2016] and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

Political scientist Andreas Jungherr suggests that people often misjudge the effects of misinformation because they overestimate how easy it is to change people’s views on issues such as voting behaviour and how effective misinformation-enabling technologies such as AI are.

We do not actually consume as much misinformation

Linked to this, despite the widespread perception that misinformation is rampant, some studies suggest that false news is only a minority of the average person’s information consumption. Indeed, news itself only makes up a small minority of our media consumption with a 2020 study finding that the average 7.5 hours of media per day consumed by those living in the US, about 14% was related to news.

Another recent study suggested that for adult Facebook users in the US, less than 7% of the content that they saw was related to news even in the months leading up to the 2020 U.S. elections. And when Americans do read news, most of it comes from credible sources. In contrast, a 2021 study  found that 89% of news URLs viewed on Facebook were from credible sources.

Indeed, political scientist Brendan Nyhan suggests that fears about the spread and influence of fake news have been over-hyped, and many of the initial concerns about the scope of the problem and its effect on political outcomes are exaggerated.

Liar’s dividend

If concerns about the scope of the problem and its effect on political outcomes are exaggerated then there are still other problems that can arise, one of which is the ‘liar’s dividend’. This is the way that concerns about misinformation can mean it is then easier to claim true information is false by relying on the belief that the information environment is saturated with misinformation.

Examples of this include Elon Musk and January 6th rioters who both raised questions in court about whether video evidence against them was AI-generated. On this basis, we can imagine candidates that have been caught on film saying something problematic, simply claiming the footage is fake. And, as the Brookings Institute points out, while the courts have developed complex procedures to validate evidence and reveal forgeries over hundreds of years, public opinion is another matter entirely.

Procedural justice

Whilst it appears that the evidence for the impact of misinformation on voting outcomes is far from clear, there is still a very real concern that the so-called ‘third-person effect’ means that it has a significant impact, just not quite in the way we might imagine. This effect is the tendency to overestimate the presumed influence of harmful media on others as compared with themselves.

Research has suggested that, regardless of political identification, people are much less satisfied with democracy the more they believed misinformation influenced others relative to themselves. So even if AI-generated misinformation doesn’t actually reach or persuade people, the huge amount of media coverage it garners looks as if it might lead the public to believe that it is.

One study found that media coverage about fake news lowered trust in the media, whilst another poll found that 53% of Americans believe that misinformation spread by AI “will have an impact on who wins the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election”, even though there is little substantive evidence to suggest this is the case.

At the heart of this is are concerns about procedural justice. We are much happier with outcomes, even if they are not the ones we like or are counter to our interests or desires, when we consider that the processes are free, fair and just. By contrast, when we feel that the procedures used to make decisions are not fair or just or we do not have a sufficient voice in the outcome, then we are dissatisfied and lose commitment to the rules as a whole. 

The implication of this for misinformation is clear: if we feel that democracy’s procedures have been manipulated due to the influence of misinformation, we are less satisfied with it.

Conclusions

Of course misinformation may well influence voting behaviours and intentions but the degree to which this is something very different from the dirty tricks that have been played around elections over the centuries is debateable.  And the evidence that misinformation is successful at influencing people remains moot.

But there does seem a convincing case to consider how the coverage of misinformation may create concerns about the reliability of our democratic systems. This suggests a need for misinformation to be discussed in a way that does not overly exaggerate its impact on others. Media literacy campaigns and education could include guidance to help people to better assess the magnitude of threat from misinformation and to manage their anxiety about it.

Linked to this, there is a concern that all examples of protest are framed as a question of disinformation. For example, Domestic Policy Advisor to Joe Biden, Susan Rice, invoked Russian meddling in the context of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest movement.  There is a danger that misinformation becomes the explanatory vehicle for all manner of behaviour and as such misattributes the underlying causes in a way that may well be unhelpful.

Overall, we can see that the social science of misinformation in relation to voting behaviour is more nuanced than first appears. This calls for a more balanced and nuanced view of the problem – and a need to look at the publics concerns and beliefs about misinformation as much (if not more than) the direct impact of misinformation on voting behaviour.

Aliens, it seems, are amongst us, or they were in the past at least according to Jaime Maussan, a well-known extraterrestrial investigator. At a meeting on the topic of unidentified aerial phenomena (aka UFOs) called in Mexico’s congress in September ’23, Maussan displayed two ‘corpse’s’ in wooden boxes and said that “these beings are not human and are not part of our terrestrial evolution.” Maussan claimed they were discovered in the Ica region of Peru in 2017 and whilst not explicitly saying they were extra-terrestrial creatures he claimed they were “intelligent and they lived with us. They should rewrite history.”

The Vice article reporting this points out that Maussan, who has a TV show about aliens, has been criticized previously for promoting extra-terrestrial news and UFO sightings without all that much evidence. 

But Maussan is not alone in his beliefs about other life forms, with an Ipsos poll of the US population in 2021 finding that 42% believed in Unidentified Flying Objects and 10% claiming to have seen one.  Of course, a UFO is not necessarily accounted for by alien life forms but in December ‘22, a global survey from Ipsos asked how likely aliens were to visit Earth in 2023. Almost one in five (18%) said they considered this was likely. The findings by country are shown below.

That so many people consider aliens may visit Earth may seem surprising for many: there is little solid evidence of alien existence so why might this number be so high? One possible reason for this is to do with the knowledge environment we live in – and the way some narratives can become popular with remarkably little evidence. We will explore one way this works: drawing on a recent book by author Sarah Kendzior whose book ‘They Knew’ offers some interesting takes on ‘conspiracy culture.’

Kendzior reflects on the epistemic environment we live in and how an understanding of the rhetorical devices that are used to construct this environment can subtly shape the way we understand the world.

This summer’s UFO conspiracy theory

In July this year, the US Congress held a public hearing on claims the government is covering up knowledge of UFOs. One of the key witnesses was David Grusch, a whistle-blower former intelligence official who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defence agency until 2023. He claimed the US has possession of “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles which the government had been trying to conceal. The Pentagon has denied this with a spokesperson saying investigators had not discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extra-terrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently”.

So what can we make of this? The line between delusion and reality can at times be a difficult one to draw – as we can see in the debate over what is a conspiracy theory. On the one hand, just how can we make sense of the notions that people seem to agree that the Earth is flat, the King Charles is a vampire, that Princess Diana faked her own death, and that world is run by a cabal of lizards that have taken human form?  But on the other hand, sometimes conspiracy theories are true.  From Watergate and Operation Yewtree to Volkswagen emissions and Weapons of the Mass Destruction of Iraq, there are many examples of conspiracy theories that have been validated. And indeed, in our everyday we conspire:  as philosopher Matthew R. X. Dentith points out, if I suspect that my friend is organising a surprise birthday party for me, then that is, within the logic of the term, a conspiracy theory.  People, governments, and businesses can conspire and do wrong. 

The notion that people who hold conspiracy theories are necessarily cranks was famously initiated by American historian Richard Hofstadter who penned a 1964 essay entitled ‘The Paranoid Style’. This was, he suggested, a feeling of dispossession that comes from living in a complex interconnected world leading us to use the simpler, and easier to understand explanation that it is the result of a secretive conspiracy of the powerful. In other words, we have a ‘deficit model’ of people that suggestes conspiracy theories are due to what Cass Sunstein has called a ‘crippled epistemology’.

Meanwhile, Uscinski and Parent pointed out in 2014 that most people hold different degrees of conspiracy theory beliefs:

“Conspiracy theories permeate all parts of American society, and cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.”

On this basis, we would be dismissing vast swathes of the population of any country as a conspiracy theorist:  but it is simply not tenable that such a large proposition of the population suffers from these deficiencies. Perhaps therefore they are a natural and comprehensible result of change and spirited public discussion to make sense of it. 

A state of inversion

On this basis, it is reasonable to have a sympathetic view of people that seek to identify the truth of a situation often only having scanty and frequently unreliable evidence to draw on. There are, after all, well-funded institutions such as SETI, staffed by scientists who consider that it is perfectly possible we will find signs of alien life. Indeed scientists at Nasa recently announced the existence of a possible rare water ocean on a giant exoplanet scores of light years away; named K2-18 b, scientists say it has “the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface”. And not only that but the agency hinted at the potential finding of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS), which on Earth is only produced by life.

So there is plenty of legitimate activity in this area which ordinary people should be allowed to discuss and debate. The challenge is the weaponization of conspiracy theories – the term is highly value laden, implying that anyone who engages in this activity must be cookie and therefore their claims baseless.  But as Anne Merlan sets out in her book, Republic of Lies, conspiracy theories are often brandished by the powerful for their own ends: she cites Hillary Clinton blaming a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for women making sexual abuse claims against her husband, then President Bill Clinton. The Bush administration infamously claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to justify its invasion of the country. US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz enthusiastically promoted the idea that Saddam Hussein, not Osama Bin Laden, was the hidden hand responsible for 9/11

Sarah Kendzior suggests that information dismissed as a conspiracy theory often in fact includes seeds of truth, and that the framing of it in this way effectively shuts down meaningful discourse about abuses of power. And this brings us to one of her central ideas, a rhetorical device she calls ‘pre-emptive narrative inversion’. By this she means attempts to engineer a narrative before it becomes widespread, aiming to shape public perception in a particular way – and therefore acting as a very effective smokescreen.

One example of this Kendzior cites is Pizzagate —in 2016 a story emerged about an “elite paedophile trafficking network” operating in 2016, that suggested Democratic elites were running a child sex ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlour called Comet Ping Pong.

Kendzior tells how this rumour was “emerging in the midst of a lot of suspicions about rich and powerful people being implicated in paedophile-trafficking operations…so [Pizzagate] was put out there to make everyone not want to report on it. Because you don’t want to elevate it. You may accidentally be spreading that rumour by reporting on it. So, there’s some understandable hesitancy there. But they also didn’t want to report on the real stories underneath.” And the real stories she is referring to are to do with the operations of Jeffrey Epstein that were emerging at that time.

As she says, “There’s this element of ridiculousness to it,” noting that anyone who debated Pizzagate at that point was considered crazy. But making the idea of the world’s most powerful people engaging in paedophilia seem so outlandish, Kendzior believes, was always the intention “It makes it very hard because the first association that somebody's hearing about Epstein, for example, would be Pizzagate. ‘Oh, this sounds like an Alex Jones kind of thing,’” she said. “And if you're trying to seem respectable, you won't even want to get involved in that conversation.”

Back to UFOs

Could there be some form of narrative inversion relating to UFO’s? Some commentators such as journalist John Ruehl suggest this may be the case asking if:

“the decades-long pursuit of unravelling the UFO mystery [could] potentially function as a cover for advanced government research and testing programs for innovative forms of propulsion and craft design?”

Ruehl suggests there is a long history of evidence for the linkage between UFOs and weapons development. During the Cold War, UFO reports were common, coinciding with missile and rocket tests (something which continues today). In 1997, the CIA revealed that the military had misled to the public throughout the Cold War about many UFO sightings to obscure its black projects and keep their technological advancements hidden from hostile foreign actors.

Secret military aircraft have also been being mistaken for UFOs, such as the U-2 reconnaissance plane, introduced in the 1950s, which had a grey frame that often reflected the sun. The B-2 Spirit, introduced in the late 1980s, also had a unique aerodynamic design and its ability to control lift, thrust, and drag at low speeds often gave the appearance that it was hovering.

Ruehl cites a 2021 report by the DoDs intelligence agency that proposes many UFOs/UAPs were technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity, as was reported by the NY Times. There are suggests that in the US a large number of hostile drones are mistaken for UFOs/UAPs and it is only recently that the government confronted them.

Developments in technology may lead to sightings that we attribute to UFOs: China has been drastically increasing its development of plasma technology in recent years, and European countries have also recently made breakthroughs in plasma propulsion technology, which may boost UFO reports.

There are clearly few, if any, incentives for governments to go public with their weapons testing, the development of new technologies or indeed evidence that foreign actors are spying on their own soil. On that basis, it does no harm to fail to discredit or even perhaps encourage speculation about UFOs – and the more outlandish the better given, as Kendzior points out, we are then likely to dismiss these notions.

In conclusion

While conspiracy theories may appear far-fetched, it does not mean they are illegitimate.  This is consistent with the perspective of Lawrence Goodwyn, historian of mass uprisings, who warned against under-estimating people as “sophisticated modern observers are inclined to regard as one of ‘inadequate consciousness’”. In other words under-estimate the population at your peril. 

It is tempting to look at the percentage of people that consider aliens are likely to visit Earth in 2023 and shake our heads in despair at the gullibility of such a large proportion of the population. And yet, who is the dupe here? Perhaps it is the much larger number who are busy shaking their heads not quite realising that they are going along with an easy narrative that UFO sightings and associated notions of alien life are crazy, failing to see that they are not looking more closely at a possible kernel of truth to be untangled here. 

Much of what we do as humans is trying to make sense of the world where we do not have the benefits of clear evidence. Maybe we are starting to better understand the way in which knowledge environments become ‘polluted’, encouraging people to focus on some explanations rather than others.  Kendzior has documented an interesting point about ‘pre-emptive narrative inversion’ that helps us to unpick the way we approach the evidence we have to hand. Perhaps documenting more of these rhetorical devices not only offers us a pathway to better understand and navigate our knowledge environments, but ensures we have greater respect for people attempting to unravel the truth behind the evidence they come across.

We live, it can seem, in a world where we can no longer trust our senses, with ‘deep fakes’ renegotiating our relationship with reality.  Take the below example of the AI-generated image apparently showing an explosion near the Pentagon – this sent ripples through the stock market before it was quickly realised the image was a fake.

In another recent example, a photo of the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appeared to show him pulling a sub-standard pint at a beer festival while a woman in the background looks on with a derisive expression. The image had been manipulated from an original photo (on the left) in which Sunak appears to have pulled a pub-level pint while the person behind him has a neutral expression.  Again, this was quickly identified as a fake.

Are we fallible humans destined to be duped by increasingly sophisticated technology that means we can no longer separate fact from fiction, the authentic from the fake? The data certainly does not look great, with a number of studies suggesting that humans are not able to distinguish between real portraits and AI-synthesized faces.

Fakes are indeed seen as a problem, with the United Nations calling AI-generated media a “serious and urgent” threat to information integrity, particularly on social media. In a recent report, the U.N. claimed the risk of disinformation online has “intensified” and singled out deepfakes in particular.

Given what we know about human psychology, to what extent are in fact fakes renegotiating our relationship with reality? We suggest that while there clearly is a cause for concern, there is also a case for understanding better the way they also tell us something important about human perception.

This is potentially important for those engaged in behaviour change as, given they seem to challenge our notions of what is ‘real’, this potentially opens up a way of challenging peoples’ intuitive assumptions about the world and, with that, opening up possibilities of change.

The psychology of fakes

The psychology literature about fakes tends to suggest that our brains can’t process all the information we see at once, which is why we often take a long time with games like Spot the Difference, or are befuddled by optical puzzles like the “Thatcher Illusion,” a seemingly normal image where we can see something is wrong but find it hard to spot that it is due to the way Margaret Thatcher’s eyes and mouth are inverted.

Psychologist Dann Simons says that is because our brains fail to log details deemed unimportant. When we flip back and forth trying to find them, we can’t because we never noticed them in the first place.

This chimes with research on inattentional blindness. In their classic experiment, Simon and Chabris show the way in which a person in a gorilla suit walking in a film sequence can be missed because the participants in the study were ‘primed’ to count the number of basketballs passes. Daniel Kahneman uses this as an example of how we can be ‘blind to the obvious’.

On this basis the omens for humans do not look promising.

But what really is a fake?

But before we reach too gloomy a conclusion about humans and our deficiencies in spotting fakes, there is a definitional problem that needs addressing. When we consider something to be a fake then it infers we can make a distinction between the real and the false. But are things really that simple? In fact there are many cases where, on closer inspection, this seemingly simple distinction starts to crumble. 

Take the topic of art – on the one hand a huge amount of money and resources are involved in establishing the authenticity of paintings, seeking confirmation that they were indeed created by the hand of the artist.  But at the same time, some artists such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst are open about the fact they have teams of people creating artworks for them. Despite the artists not creating the works themselves but commissioning other people (which in other circumstances might be considered to be inauthentic) – the prices they garner suggest that this is not in any way a problem.

And our brains can convince the body that a fake treatment is the real thing — the so-called placebo effect — and thus stimulate healing. Given that under the right conditions, a placebo can be just as effective as the ‘real’ treatments then can the fake really be a fake as we commonly understand it?

As social critic Rob Horning suggests, it seems that what is real and what is fake is not always a straightforward process, as he comments with regard to ‘fake news’:

“That phrase implies that there is news out there that is not fake, that is entirely real, that is totally accurate. But nothing is totally accurate; everything is an approximation, and how close or far it is from the “truth” depends on where you are looking from and what you need to hear.”

All of this suggests that the notion of fake versus authentic is not quite as binary as it first appears: and not only that, but as we shall now see, perhaps at times people are even drawn to fakes.

We just baddies that’s smart with our money

A recent report in the Financial Times suggests that the trend for “dupes” has boomed in clothes, accessories and footwear.  Journalist Annachiara Biondi wrote about the way some young people are attracted to fake items, enjoying identities of people that are making a smart move:

“For most of them,…the real faux pas seems to be paying full price for authentic products when replicas, allegedly of comparable quality and at one-tenth of the cost, are just one click away.”

Similarly, cosmetic surgery used to be shrouded in secrecy, with the notion that we could pass off our enhanced looks as genuine. This has now changed with celebrities such as the Kardashians openly talking about the procedures they have, which means that for many people there is no longer any shame in owning up that how they look is ‘fake’.

And in case we thought our complex relationship with fakes is recent, we can turn to Medieval history and the way people were drawn to religious relics. This is the practice of preserving and enshrining the remains of saints and heroes, or other items associated with their life or death. While today we perhaps might want some evidence of the authenticity of the relic, historians suggest that a Medieval person may well not have been that bothered by it being a ‘fake’ — as God was considered capable of imbuing anything with holiness. As art researcher Jennifer Freeman suggests:

“Relics… are shortcuts. They're visual mantras to focus the .. mind, a link between this world and the next.”

With all this we can see fakes are not necessarily always problematic for all concerned, what a fake is or is not can be contested, but also even items that are patently not ‘authentic’ can frequently be imbued with meaning and connection.

Back to memes

Our concern with fakes may distract us from what they offer those engaging with them – they help us to tell a story and a good example of this is the meme. A meme is typically not considered to be a factual document but instead is a rhetorical device. Rob Horning suggests that when something circulates within the context of ‘memes’, this specifies how it is supposed to consumed: as something made to mock somebody, make someone laugh, make a point and so on.

Horning suggests that in the same way as many visual illusions work, we often enjoy the sensation of being momentarily tricked, imagine others being tricked and maybe experience a ‘what if’ moment. Reality is momentarily suspended and what we took to be true, the world as predictable, stable and knowable, is one that has suddenly changed. This ‘liminality’ between what is real and what is not where our disbelief is suspended, is something that we are accustomed to also seeking from stories, books, and films.

There is something carnivalesque about it: in the same way, Medieval carnivals would mock the authorities at the time though ‘rituals of inversion”, with jesters or dancers costumed as priests and nuns.   During Saturnalia, a Roman pagan festival, masters had to wait on their slaves; carnival allowed peasants to impersonate kings.

So fakes are not always strictly a means by which we separate fact from fiction but something we actively engage in, and work out how to understand about the world.

Buckets versus searchlights

We can see from the above that there are interesting psychological implications of fakes. A body of knowledge that seems relevant here is via psychologist Teppo Felin, who suggests that a ‘bucket theory’ of perception reflects the information we collect about our environment as passive and automatic. We assimilate a world that exists independent of ourselves, and our limitations means we can fail to spot fakes.

In contrast, a  ‘searchlight theory’ of perception suggests that the way we make sense of the world is active, using guesses, theories, questions, and hypotheses, meaning that the way we comprehend things is by directing perception and attention. On this basis we do not always see fakes as we are looking in the wrong place, a type of misdirection perhaps.  

Hence in the Simon and Chabris gorilla experiment referred to earlier, we could be asked to look at all manner of things from the hair colour of the actors to the gender and ethnic composition. Any of these are clear but only if you are looking for them and not something else. The fact that we miss something is not a function of blindness or bias, but an entirely rational and successful process given what we set out to do.

Arguably much of the narrative about fakes implies we use a ‘bucket’ theory of perception – hence the alarm that we are in danger of false representations of a solid, stable and one dimensional world.  But as Horning suggests, perhaps fakes show that we have a more complex and at times playful relationship with the world. Hence a little like a visual illusion (which in a sense they often are) we switch between two different versions of reality; we can perhaps see that fakes might encourage us to understand that there is more than one way in which we can look at the world.

In other words, we are thrown into a moment where our understanding of reality is shaken up, and we can see other possibilities – our fast, intuitive processing slows down, fakes create ‘friction’ which means we are forced to stop and think, similar to the notion of ‘disfluency’ that we have noted previously.

In conclusion

There a danger of fetishizing the impact fakes on our lives and the danger this represents – as with any way in which we operate and communicate, they can be weaponised and used for nefarious ends. But at the same time fakes may not always deserve the degree of concern that often seems to accompany them. Indeed, we can all find examples of institutions and individuals that are not ‘fake’ but legitimate and authentic that have nevertheless wreaked havoc with people’s lives.

Fakes can be damaging that is clear but at the same time there is something interesting, subversive and challenging about them – they allow us to see reality in a different way, and for what we understand about the world to be reconsidered. This can create an interesting space to then disrupt the normal fluency of processing and reconsider the world as we know it.  Which, for a behavioural scientist interested in making change happen, could well offer some untapped and useful opportunities.

It is said that truth is a fragile commodity as people readily talk ‘bullshit’ with no effort made to check the truthfulness or otherwise of what is said said to their audience, who in turn are duped into believing it. While this may at times be true, we will set out how bullshit can be more nuanced than this suggests, with all parties tacitly agreeing to a set of ‘bullshit rituals’ to oil the wheels of social convention.

This is important for us to understand given the problematic role bullshit seems to have in our lives. For example, Donald Trump is famously reported to have made 1,318 false statements in the first nine months of his Presidency.  But in addition to making clearly false statements, he is also cited as a bullshitter for the way it appears he did not care about being truthful. For example, during his campaign, he stated that millions of illegal immigrants would be deported once he was elected which is given as an example of bullshit because Trump could not have been certain that, as President, he would have the actual authority to decide on deportations.

Another example which may potentially be placed in the category of bullshitting is the significant number of products being marketed as 'green', including up to 91% of all dishwashing items and 100% of toilet products. The Chief Executive of the CMA has indicated that the CMA is "concerned many shoppers are being misled and potentially even paying a premium for products that aren’t what they seem". It is therefore investigating the extent to which the claims can be substantiated – the claims made on behalf of these products may be revealed to be a case of bullshitting.

For something that seems so problematic, why does it so apparently widespread? To help understand this we used a behavioural science lens to unearth a surprising range of research findings. But we start our journey with on of the defining voices of this topic, philosopher Harry Frankfurt and his book On Bullshit.

What is bullshit?

Frankfurt makes a distinction between lies and bullshit: both the liar and the bullshitter try and get away with something; while lying is a deliberate act of deceit, bullshitting is when we offer up claims and information and we are simply indifferent to the truth. This ‘indifference to how things really are’ has therefore been at the heart of how bullshit is defined (and makes it distinct from lying). 

With this in mind, one of the jobs that psychologists have been doing is to try and understand the audience - why do some people seem more susceptible than others and can we identify some consistent individual differences in bullshit receptivity?

Pseudo-profound bullshit

To explore ‘bullshit receptivity’, Gordon Pennycook and colleagues undertook research on what they called Pseudo Profound Bullshit. This is when “seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous.”

In a series of experiments, participants were presented with bullshit statements composed of buzzwords randomly organised in a way that provided syntactical logic but had no obvious meaning: for example, ‘Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena’. 

The experiments identified that those more likely be receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability, and more prone to ontological confusions.  They are also more likely than average to have paranormal beliefs and to support complementary and alternative medicines. Hence there are consistent cognitive styles that shape individual differences in bullshit receptivity which Pennycook suggests can be measured and understood.

Importantly Pennycook does suggest we need to take care before dismissing the capabilities of some people. It may be that the experiment participants assumed any statements that is part of an experimental study would be designed with some kind of meaning in mind. So the context might suggest a degree of meaning which might lead to them not being dismissed as readily as we would do in other contexts - we will come back to this point.

Seductive allure

To examine further if how the way information is presented can influence our receptivity to bullshit, Jonathan Silas and colleagues explored how people engage with explanatory scientific information. Specifically they assessed whether reductive or technical language (explanations that refer to more fundamental processes or smaller processes but do not offer explanatory information) obfuscates understanding: what is commonly referred to as seductive allure (in other words bullshit).  

The study explored this in the context of behavioural intentions to take up a COVID-19 vaccine (this was in 2021 when COVID-19 vaccinations had been approved for use in numerous countries and had been shown to be safe and effective but yet been fully rolled out). They showed that when the participants were presented with good explanations, the introduction of additional technical language (bullshit) resulted in lower levels of agreement and propensity to take-up the vaccine.

This seems positive, suggesting people have a sense that the presence of bullshit means we should proceed with caution. There was, however, also a finding that people gave a better evaluation of poor explanations when they were accompanied by technical (bullshit) language - which influenced their stated likelihood to get vaccinated. So, it seems there is an allure associated with technical language in some contexts, offering evidence of the way bullshit can influence our behaviours.

Maybe then we are all vulnerable to bullshit – albeit for some people and contexts more than others. If so, this tells us something important about how our minds work – perhaps we often have a pretty hazy grasp of the world meaning we can be seduced by bullshit more readily than we think?

Are we all hanging on by our fingertips?

Research supporting the notion that we have a tenuous grasp on the world (and with that a receptivity to bullshit) comes from research by Rebecca Lawson who showed a group of psychology undergraduates a schematic drawing of a bicycle that was missing several parts. She asked the students to fill in the missing parts of the frame, the pedals and the chain:

She found that despite their claims of familiarity with how bicycles work, about half the students were unable to complete the drawings correctly – some examples of how they completed them are shown below:

So it seems we can often be in a position where we simply do not know the details of the very things that we are tasked with understanding, but all the time assuming that we do in fact understand it.

Building on this, Nick Chater's book ‘The mind is flat’, sets out the way we assume we have a great deal of deep thoughts but in fact, he claims, there is an abundance of evidence to suggest we make things up all the time. We come to conclusions on the fly and by confabulating explanations, with a mere illusion that we have understanding.  If this is the case, it seems that we are hard-wired to be susceptible to bullshit.

This is congruent with a recent report on the BBC's reporting of economics which suggested that although there was "plenty to applaud" in the coverage, many journalists also ‘lack understanding of basic economics’ – so if even experts tasked with reporting on a technical subject seem to be bullshitting then what hope do we have?

Office bullshit

With this evidence, we might conclude bullshit reflects a deficit in human capabilities and that we need support to be more aware of our failings and take action to become more ‘bullshit literate’.

A counterpoint to this ‘deficit model’ is deftly provided by Dan Kärreman and Andreas Rasche of Copenhagen Business School who looked at what some might consider to be the epicentre of bullshit, the office. Offices it seems are a fertile ground for exploring bullshit as there is a tendency for what they call ‘unclarifiable clarity’ - language that seems clear but on closer inspection is meaningless. We will let readers be the judge of this but a recent finding that only 57% of UK workers understand their employer’s strategy might be read as supporting this!

So what can we pick out from the Kärreman and Rasche paper to help us understand bullshit? There are two points which stand out for us:

• First, much of the analysis of bullshit seems to imply a straightforward notion of truth that ignores the way in which truth is not as straight forward as it might first seem - so what constitutes bullshit is contested.

• Second, by focussing on bullshit as a harmful enterprise, we tend to downplay the value of bullshit language for lubricating social interactions and exploring new ways of self and reality (see this paper and this one).

This seems quite a counterintuitive perspective given the concerns we have over fake news and misinformation, agendas that bullshit is often swept up with. But Kärreman and Rasche make a good case for the helpful role that bullshit often has in the modern organisation. For example, it can validate managerial decisions and actions as well as impressing and seducing a diverse audience who might otherwise not be attentive.

They suggest, for example, that notions (they consider to be somewhat bullshit terms) such as ‘strategic philanthropy’ and ‘shared value’ have helpfully legitimized CSR activities to investors and made actions in support of responsible business practices appear rational to financial markets.  Bullshit can also help to rationalise and legitimize management decisions such as describing unpopular programmes as ‘right sizing’ or ‘cutting edge’ to emphasise the benefits to the organisation.

In this way they suggest bullshit provides a workaround for managers to offer a sense of commanding without commands or directives which can be negatively received – it softens the mandates . In a similar way, strategizing involves articulating goals in an interesting and exciting way whilst not fully knowing what is going on (to their point - reality can be contested ground).  In these cases, the bullshitting job is to instil confidence using ‘aspirational talk’.

Similarly, they note that recipients of bullshit can be perfectly aware of its use but may well decide to let it pass. In other words, people have a sense of when a situation calls for bullshit: returning to Pennycook’s earlier comment, people may be good at recognising when the social context means bullshit is acceptable (or that it has some degree of meaning and import).

In conclusion

The informal nature of the word bullshit has perhaps meant it has not always been given it as close a scrutiny as other terms (such as misinformation or fake news). And yet the concerns we have about our epistemic environment being corrupted means that it is now something that is being looked at with greater interest.  Is bullshit a new sort of informational currency (or even a longstanding device that is now increasing in usage) and if so, is this something we should be alarmed about?

The focus given to the subject by social scientists does seem to infer that bullshit is a problem as it can deceive and mislead. But if we move our lens slightly and see it as a conversational device rather than purely as a means of imparting misleading knowledge then we can see it opens up a range of new, more positive interpretations. And it can be all to easy to assume recipients are helpless victims when in fact we intuitively recognise the role it plays in managing social meaning and interactions.

There is a danger of taking a narrow ‘information-sharing’ lens to communication which might not take into account the wider social purposes of bullshit. We all use a wide range of unwritten speech norms when in conversation so meaning is imparted not only with what is said but what is implied.  When we speak, we communicate meaning in two ways: conventionally – the words themselves and conversationally – the use of words in a specific context. For us to untangle things it requires both the speaker and the recipient to work together. 

The interaction of these mean we are able to speak with nuance and subtly – some things are better left unsaid but inferred. And this is where bullshit comes in. It offers us a chance to float things, test stuff out, soften messages, inspire and suggest. That we have not made explicit lies but instead used bullshit means it is easier to deny, allowing for a ‘reactive reversal’ if what has been suggested does not sit well with the audience or our imaginative perspectives of the future turn out not to be true or practical after all.

In terms of the audience, the accounts of humans failings with regard to bullshit perhaps do not fully take into account what has been called the ‘paradox of the psychosocial’. This sets out how we might disapprovingly label people as suggestible if they accept knowledge from others as true despite lack of evidence but that it is this very capacity which is seen as something to be celebrated given it makes learning, affection, socialization and social cohesion possible.

Bullshit surfaces something about the nuanced nature of our relationship with information - we operate in a shared knowledge community where we rely on others making us vulnerable to ‘epistemic pollution’. But at the same time we understand that not everything that is said is necessarily all that is being communicated - we are collectively smarter than that.

On this basis we can make a case for a kinder view of bullshit, albeit recognising that it can be used for disreputable means as much as for positive outcomes.

Thanks to Professor Peter Ayton for a useful conversation when developing this article.

A widely shared meme earlier this year was that of the ‘Pope in a Puffer’, showing Pope Francis looking stylish in a silver puffer jacket. Just why did this create so much interest?  Perhaps one clue to this comes from science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who famously observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. It is clear that the notion of magic is something that fascinates us but why?  We argue that is, in part at least, because although we rationally deny its existence, at some level we act as if it does.

In fact, there is in fact a great deal of psychology literature on way magical beliefs shape the way we engage with the world.  Beliefs about the magical properties of items is important as it applies to a wide range of the ways we engage with the world having wider social, cultural and political significance.

The history of magic

In medieval times people considered magic was simply an element of everyday living, with it used as an attempt to influence something outside of the bounds of the natural world. People would combine words and actions to try and change or influence something in their lives that they couldn’t control through ordinary means. Examples of the everyday nature of magic from this period include the way people not only created an herbal remedy for an illness, but recited words and performed actions to draw supernatural forces to increase the potency of the medicine. Another use was for predicting the future: this included making use of what was considered magical information in the calls of birds or the paths that they took as they flew across the sky.

Whilst in medieval Europe, there was no particular distinction between magic and religion the Reformation, the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism arguably stripped Christianity of its magical power to provide believers protection from misfortune. This movement caused a decline in not only the use of magic, but the belief in magic as well. The scientific revolution maintained this momentum, albeit many of the principles of the methods of science were developed from magical origins (such as astrology).

Magic today

Given this context, we might expect magic to have firmly been consigned to a footnote in history, yet magical beliefs have persisted over time. If we look at more recent history we find evidence for widespread belief in magic. Historian Owen Davies sets out the way Oujia was hugely popular at one point, where a movable indicator is used and moved about a board to spell out words during a séance. Another area was spirit photography, a type of photography whose primary goal is to capture images of ghosts and other spiritual entities. 

Psychologist and magician Gustav Kuhn points out that magical concepts continue to play a role in our adult lives. He suggests they help us deal with complex situations that we would otherwise simply fail to grasp, and they can make the inanimate world more fathomable. For example, every time we empty our computer’s trash folder, we accept the magical belief that the files have been deleted. This is a far more manageable a concept for us than having to deal with an intricate of computer programming explanation.

In another example, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder can be seen as “magical thinking” because it often involves  supernatural associations of cause and effect. For example, an individual might have an intrusive thought: If I tread on cracks in the pavement, I will get into a car accident. They then alleviate the fear by performing a series of rituals and avoidance behaviour, driven by the perception that such rituals could ‘magically’ prevent the accident.

There has also been experimental evidence that suggests despite conscious disbelief in magic we continue to act as if it is true.  In one study, participants were shown an apparently magical effect: a square plastic card became badly damaged in an empty box after a magic spell was cast on the box. Participants then tested using either a) a low-risk test condition where driver licences were at risk of destruction by a magic spell or b) a high-risk test condition where participants own hands were the object at risk of being damaged as a result of the spell.

Results showed that in the low-risk condition 12% of participants prohibited the magic spell, but in the high-risk condition 50% asked the experimenter not to use the spell and justified this by saying it might damage their hand.  So placed under stress, it seems many of us do exhibit and do seem to reference beliefs about magic to be shaping our behaviour.

Misdirection

Long term scholar of beliefs in magic Eugene Subbotsky suggests that laws of science have a number of key principles that mean magical properties are not feasible and yet we maintain a degree of belief in them.  The work of psychologists Paul Rozin and Bruce Hood suggest that we can indeed find evidence of these sorts of beliefs in the population, which tend to only appear in specific circumstances and yet might reveal something broader about our beliefs.

The laws of contagion

According to this magical law, things that once have been in contact with each other may influence each other through transfer of some of their properties. This influence remains after the physical contact has ceased and can be permanent. In traditional magical practices, contact is often through personal ‘residue’; a lock of hair, nail clipping or scrap of clothing for example are considered to retain some essential properties of their original owner.  This means that action taken against the residue can affect impact the original source – for example, in traditional practices voodoo dolls will often incorporate hair or clothing from the victim.

Of course, scientific laws would set out the way different objects are independent of each other and would not have any linkages and we might therefore expect to see any evidence of this residing in peoples beliefs.

To examine this, we can turn to Bruce Hood who, in a famous experiment, offered people a financial incentive to wear a second-hand but cleaned and disinfected cardigan. Understandably, most people agreed to wear the item. But then he asked, ‘Would you still wear it if you knew it belonged to Fred West?’ (a notorious mass murderer.)  Most people then refused saying it felt disgusting or dirty. So we can see the notion of contagion does in fact seem to be activated here – somehow the cardigan had taken on some properties of its previous owner and as such we did not want to be contaminated by it either.

In another example, Peter Ayton and colleagues examined the effect on property prices of London’s blue plaques, commemorative plaques that are erected on buildings to serve as historical markers of notable men and women who lived in them. They found that after a plaque is installed, the sales prices of London properties increased by 27% more than the sales prices of other neighbouring properties over the same period.

The Law of similarity

A second law, ‘similarity’, suggests things that resemble one another share fundamental properties. As with contagion, the image is believed to contain the essence of its ‘source,’ so that action on the image can produce similar effects on the source. Hence, when two objects that resemble each other, at some level we can assume they are connected.

One example of this is herbalism, where medieval books such as "The Doctrine of Signatures", suggest that the appearance of a plant hinted what it was useful for.  On this basis, it was suggested that figs treated impotence and infertility because they vaguely resemble testicles and ginseng was a considered a potent treatment for blood disorders because it looks like veins.

To examine the degree to which this might hold today for a wider population we can again turn to Paul Rozin who asked people to do a range of behaviours such as drink soup from a brand new, pristine bedpan or eat chocolate that looked like dog turds.  Despite the participants being raised in a rationalist culture and knew items were safe to consume, most showed a marked preference for eat or drinking from an alternative source.

A more recent example of this is the outcry that the company Boston Dynamics received about a video posted online showing employees trying to kick robotic dog, Spot, over in order to show how robust it is. The video spread like wildfire and raised huge questions in the media about the ethics of how we treat robots.  It seems that the fact we are asking this question suggests the magical law of similarity is still present in our beliefs.

Magic and digital design

More than two decades ago, usability consultant and designer Bruce Tognazzini made a case for applying stage magic principles to human-computer interaction. He observed an "eerie correspondence" between the two fields and encouraged a broad array of researchers and designers to probe and use ideas and techniques from magic in interaction design (see this paper for a great review of this area).

And in fact much of the work on the psychology of magic (such as this paper) has tended to focus on the way in which magicians are expert in manipulating people’s perceptual experiences. The scientific study of misdirection and deception explores the way in which our attention is diverted often involving a wide range of cognitive mechanisms.  Gaming design is another area of focus which is not surprising given it also shares similarities with magic; games are often set in fantastical worlds where magic is real and both game designers and magicians strive to create an engaging experience for their audience, seeking to create engagement and surprise.

In conclusion

For our purposes, we are less interested in the craft of the stage magician to give the appearance of magic and more interested in the beliefs we have that reflect an assumption that the world works according to magical principles.  The research of people such as Paul Rozin suggests that we do in fact, at some level, have a belief the world works this way although we deny it when asked.

A useful term here was coined by philosopher Tanar Gendler: ‘alief’, the notion of the unexamined, intuitive beliefs we hold that are automatically released in specific circumstances (such as the fear that we suddenly experience when walking over an abyss on a safe but transparent bridge).

The finding that we continue have magical ‘aliefs’ suggests we have fertile imaginations that can break free of consensus thinking, and that even the most widely accepted principles of the way we understand the world can be debated and challenged. Returning to the ‘Pope in a Puffer’, arguably our fascination with this reflects our ‘aliefs’ how we enjoy playing with magical concepts and possibilities.

Rather than seeing our intuitive belief in magic as a weakness in humans or a sign of our tendency towards grabbing comforting easy answers at times of stress, perhaps we can instead see this as an indication of human creativity and our collective willingness to imagine the impossible.   And in the environment we live in today, many might consider this to be an asset rather than a deficit.

We are never far from a news headline which suggests humans are a deluded and suggestible bunch, vulnerable to fakery, swept up in a swirl of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Humans, it seems, find it hard to unpack fact from fiction.  But why is this and what can be done about it?

We have long been fascinated with those that dupe us, as illustrated by the Netflix series, “Inventing Anna”, about Anna Sorokin who stole over $250,000 from wealthy acquaintances and high-end Manhattan businesses between 2013 and 2017.  While the series centres itself on Sorokin as the arch manipulator, perhaps less is said about the people that fell for her story and who handed over money: why did people believe her? 

Another striking but very different example of the widespread and longstanding nature of our capacity for being duped is that of ‘speculative bubbles,’ spikes in the value of assets within a particular industry, fuelled by speculative activity. At some point the speculation collapses, largely as the excitement is found to be unsupported by the fundamentals.  It seems people have always been duped into thinking they can make money from ‘too good to be true’ investments such as the Dutch Tulipmania of the 17th century, the South Sea Bubble of the 18th century and, of course, the more recent cryptocurrency speculation for which the bubble is now bursting. Why are we so keen to chase high risk dubious investments?

Does this mean we humans are a fallible bunch, inevitably vulnerable to those intent on extracting money from us?  We will argue that this version of events misses an essential aspect of human behaviour: that we necessarily need to co-operate and trust each other with a shared sense of how the world works.  And while this co-operative capability offers humans a real strength it also comes with vulnerability.  Here is how we think this works.

Our vulnerability to lies and fakes

The dominant narrative of humans was set early by psychologists like William James who considered we can be readily manipulated and more recently by people such as Herb Simon and Daniel Kahneman who have centred a philosophy of psychology on the bounded nature of our capabilities.  We can call this a ‘deficit’ model of humans, reflecting the notion that our limited and suggestible minds are vulnerable to the devious means others have to influence us.  

And one way this happens, suggest Brent Goldfarb and David Kisrch from their research into speculative financial bubbles, is through the use of of narrative.   Every investment, they say, begins as a story about an imagined future and from there, all the activity, investment, marketing and innovation activity is centred around that story and vision of the future. As they put it:

Good stories sell, and the more uncertain the outcome, the more leeway for entrepreneurs to fabulate.

So maybe this is all about the person setting out to swindle us and our fallibility in accepting their story: if we fall for a good story, then surely all that is needed is for someone to be skilled at storytelling to convince us of their questionable claims.  The notion of ‘truthiness’ is closely related to this, the idea that our shortcomings can be manipulated and taken advantage of by clever storytelling that has a mere veneer of validity. 

But just why might this be the case?  To understand this, we need to unpack the power of stories and a closely related phenomenon, that of trust. It is these two interlinked elements that are such an intrinsic part of human life and reveal something very important about our apparent gullibility.

The power of story telling

To unpack the apparent power of stories, we need to see the way that these reflect the way we share information, what we might call ‘common ground,’ the way we see the world, the stuff that we consider as true without really examining it. This is what philosopher Robert Stalnaker describes as publicly shared information, a shared resource that those in a conversation use to build and perform social interactions. 

When we act in social contexts, we treat the information that sits in our common ground as being true, and as such it is a premise for public action. So common ground may be relating to the value of recycling our household waste:  it is typically (although by no means universally held) common ground that it is a good thing to be doing.  This forms a premise which is reflected in the way we then regularly set out our recycling to be collected by refuse collection services.

A successful story is one that is not necessarily overtly changing our beliefs, but instead understands and draws on the common ground between us, referencing what Kristie Dotson calls ‘common epistemic resources’ and Saray Ayala names ‘affordances’.  It works within the parameters of what we understand and expect, meaning there is little to question and challenge.

Weaving this into a behavioural science way of formulating the issue, we might reference the ‘S-frame’, the systemic characteristics that shape our behaviour.  This is not only the formal aspects of this  (e.g. regulatory, taxation, distribution) but, for our purposes, the epistemic (knowledge) environment we live in that is used to determine how we act together.  As philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò points out in his excellent book on the topic:

“We act as if the information in the common ground is true, in the main, for much the same reason that we walk on sidewalks – it’s easiest and that’s what it’s there for.”

Legitimate knowledge

A useful question at this point might be what makes up this common ground and who decides what this is?  Some things are simple: that the earth is round and revolves around the sun is (mostly) common ground which we are not having to check in with each other about. 

But there are also more contentious aspects to our common ground: for example, that working hard and being skilled results in success is a widely held view, often taken as a common ground in our conversations.  But as we discussed previously, this common ground notion of meritocracy does not quite hold up to reality. While we may often assume this as part of ‘how life is’ we are not really called upon to examine it too closely.

We can see that common ground is what Professor of Contemporary Culture Clare Birchall would call legitimate (as opposed to illegitimate) knowledge.  This is information that is accepted and considered valid, versus information that is illegitimate or false and as such it is typically rejected.  Legitimate knowledge might reflect official guidance (such as health protection guidance from government bodies) but can at times be unofficial, or popular knowledge, such as celebrity gossip.

A convincing narrative will stay within this common ground, legitimate knowledge, rather than straying into illegitimate knowledge. If we move away from common ground then the audience are hearing things they do not expect; if the story starts to question their understanding of the world, then the premise of the story is less likely to be accepted. 

That is not to say that we can never accept a novel idea that challenges what we knew and then incorporate it into a new sense of the common. But this is not always easy: what is accepted as common ground is not always a level playing field and those with resources and privilege will find it easier to tilt it in a direction that favours them (such as by influencing social media conversations, or news headlines) than other groups without these same levers to draw upon.

Of course, we are not helpless in the face of the common ground but it is certainly easier to assimilate a story that reflects this.  While this might sound a little passive, it is important to remember that if we don’t do this, then we have to entail all the work of unpicking and challenging the assumptions of this common ground.   And there are many disincentives at work here: not only in terms of the resulting difficulty in social communication but the way in which challenging ‘legitimate knowledge’ can also result in alienation from others and being cast as a ‘conspiracy theorist’, a trouble-maker or simply a general nuisance.  Just like the side-walk, it is much easier to walk on it than question it.

Of course some people and groups seek to challenge common ground, not least as the assumptions on which they are based marginalise them (for example Táíwò talks about this in relation to social justice issues). The common ground, or ‘legitimate knowledge,’ can not only be highly problematic but also system-preserving in that there is an ease with which we assimilate it, whilst system-altering or illegitimate knowledge is typically much more difficult for us to assimilate.

There is an important point here for our discussion about human gullibility, that the use of stories is less about trying to manipulate people’s beliefs about what is true (as we might expect from a deficit model of humans) and more the shaping of social systems that means the easiest route is to assimilate the narrative, to not question and to simply play along. 

Common ground and trust

This moves us to another related point, which is that for the ground to be common, it necessarily needs us to invest it with our trust. If we do not trust the common ground, then by definition it is no longer common.  In other words, if we conclude that actually what people are assuming in common is wrong, then we no longer trust that narrative. 

Generally we can see that trust, common ground and stories are closely linked: we have to trust the common ground that we share with others if we are to live in a harmonious effective way.  The narratives we live by are based on a common understanding, a shared notion of legitimate knowledge that we can trust in.

Philosopher of language Paul Grice famously argued that communication is an intrinsically cooperative endeavour and as such trust is a critical part of human life and the way we communicate. Indeed, psychologist David Dunning and his colleagues have pointed out that without trusting that others are telling the truth, it is hard to imagine our daily lives being possible.

No surprise then that there is a great deal of research showing the critical importance of trust in human living. Research finds we tend to default to trusting others over distrusting them, we believe others over doubting them and  we go along with someone’s self-presentation rather than embarrassing them by calling them out.

In fact people lie far less than we might think meaning we can characterise human as having a natural  ‘truth default.’ This was shown in one series of studies, where participants were asked to state whether statements shown to them were true or false. But this was not as simple as it first appeared, as the researcher would interrupt the participant on some items, so they couldn’t fully process the statements. This meant it was possible to assess people’s default assumption: when they were not able to fully process the statement and were in doubt, would they default to belief or disbelief?  The finding was clear – in these instances participants tended to assume they were true.

Two routes for being duped

This seems to suggest that there are two ways we might end up being duped. The first is when the common ground is shaped to be based on problematic values and perspectives. As we have pointed out previously, journalists, interest groups and vested interests compete to elevate frames (common ground) that reflect their own concerns and ideologies. An example of this is a paper by sustainability researcher William Lamb that suggests outright denial of climate change has been replaced by more subtle discourses, or frames, that accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts.  Depending on your point of view you might consider this entirely reasonable position while others may consider this means by which the population is being duped into not pressing for more urgent action to be taken. 

And then there is the micro level means by which duping can take place, at a more individual basis.  On this basis if the person duping us is aligning with the ‘common ground’ then it is easier to go along with them, trusting their story and giving them the benefit of the doubt whilst they discreetly take advantage of you.  This can explain why people gave Anna Sorokin money even though ‘Red flags were everywhere.’ And also why people continued to invest in crypt-currencies even though there were abundant warnings about their dangers long ago.

So if we have a ‘trust default’ and a bad actor understands the common ground upon which this trust circulates, then this offers ways to knowingly operate and dupe us. But we are at pains to point out a subtle but critical point: this is not necessarily reflective of a deficit on our part– in fact success in life, the very opposite of deficit, means trusting what we hear from others. The very human capability of being open to others and being willing to trust contains within it a paradox. The very same mechanism that underpins success can also mean we are vulnerable to deception and fakes. 

How we address this

If we are considering that our susceptibility to being duped is a necessary part of being human rather than a deficit, this suggests that remedies which focus on fixing us (such as through critical thinking skills and inoculation strategies) while arguably necessary, may simply not be sufficient for the task in hand. The impacts of maintaining vigilance to critically assess the information we receive may mean we then struggle to communicate well as we cannot trust the ‘common ground’ resulting in a deterioration in the effectiveness and efficiency of communication between us.

Let’s take ‘deep fakes’ as an example: these are realistic, computer-generated photos of individuals. People struggle to distinguish between real and computer-generated faces and as such we are all vulnerable to their usage for malicious purposes such as political propaganda, espionage and information warfare. One route to address this is to ask people to be more critical when evaluating digital faces. This can include using reverse image searches to check whether photos are genuine, being wary of social media profiles with little personal information or a large number of followers, and being aware of the potential for deep fake technology to be used for nefarious purposes. In other words, we cannot trust the common ground any longer and have to undertake a range of checks to check its veracity. 

But just how realistic is this for us to operate in this way as we go about our typically casual browsing of the internet?  It surely seems a rather ambitious demand on people which would result in a much slower process for us. A more realistic approach may well be increased regulation and technology solutions such as improved algorithms for detecting fake digital faces which could then be embedded in social media platforms, helping us distinguish the real from the fake when it comes to new connections’ faces. 

The fixing of people may well not only be unrealistic but will incur significant costs as we slow down and struggle to operate effectively. The balance of efforts may well be better spent on systemic fixes rather than individual level ones.

Final thoughts

The deficit model of humans would suggest that we are susceptible to being duped by manipulative story-telling that shapes our beliefs about the world. But this does not seem to be the case. Indeed, it may be that we do not always whole heartedly sign up to what we hear but we are willing to ‘go along with it’: it is all too easy to think about what we believe as binary (we either believe it or we don’t) but in fact as we all know from our own experience, there are many different forms and degrees of belief. 

And even if something may be on the ‘false belief’ side of the equation, then there are reasons why we hold onto them as Shankar Vedantam points out:

“…self-​deception can sometimes be functional—it enables us to accomplish useful social, psychological, or biological goals. Holding false beliefs is not always the mark of idiocy, pathology, or villainy.”

In fact, belief is only one reason why we do something.  As Táíwò points out, drawing on the famous fable of the Emperors New Clothes, the crowds were likely cheering the emperor not because each believed they were the only ones stupid enough not to see his clothes but because there was a whole range of other incentives that meant they would go along with this, including the threat to their livelihoods if they did not cheer. This suggests that we need to be wary not to mistake the way populations have ‘played along’ with the common ground as evidence that they are true believers. It may at times be much much easier to appear to be true believers, playing along with a social script, while artfully resisting those in authority.

Following Táíwò, we can perhaps characterise communication as akin to a kind of behaviour or action: it less about the way our beliefs are shaped (which is often how it is talked about) and perhaps more about what sort of information we have readily available to act on and how this determines the way certain behaviours are then facilitated and other not.  And thus the way we behave in and respond to conversation is largely governed by the exact same forces, norms and incentives that explain everything else that we do.

AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, grabbed the headlines with his claims that an AI is sentient. “I know a person when I talk to it,” Lemoine told the Washington Post. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.”

To propose that an AI has sentience feels a long way from what is right now technically possible. So why, we might ask, is an AI engineer claiming this?  Has Lemoine been duped? And how can any of us disentangle what might be a real person and what is an imitation, a fake?

Another area where we could argue there is controversy concerning what is real or fake is in the ‘predictive powers’ of AI.  For example, there is a suggestion that AI can predict the outcome of football’s next world cup. But how authentic can this claim be given the unique conditions in which the world cup will be played (e.g., the timing and climate of the tournament, and the portfolio of players taking part)?

And a wide range of other attributes associated with AI are surely open to challenge. For example a machine known as "Botto" has already made in more than €1 million from its first four NFT artworks at auction and an ‘AI Influencer’ Miquela Sousa is featured in product endorsements for streetwear and luxury brands such as Calvin Klein and Prada.  Across these cases, do we really think that machines have sentience, powers of prediction, artistic skills, and fashion sensibilities?  

The degree to which we consider something real or fake is an issue that can feel pressing, as digital technology seems to make it easier than ever to create convincing fakes.  Take ‘deepfakes’ the result of machine-learning systems where AI ingests video, photographs, or audio of a person or object, learns to copy its behaviour and then outputs the results onto another target person, creating an uncannily precise counterfeit. There are many concerns about the damage that can be created by deepfakes, but also by impact of mis-, or dis-information (‘fake news’) with frequent suggestions that this can have huge societal implications.

Arguably the same considerations seem to be related to the way financial ‘bubbles’ are created: for example, Nassim Nicholas Taleb alikens Bitcoin to the 17th century bubble where the price of tulip bulbs skyrocketed before crashing.  This reflects the idea that speculation can be based on something that is ultimately fake and we are all collectively duped.

Why we might succumb to ‘fake’

So how can behavioural science help us here, to understand how we apparently seem to succumb to fakes.  There are a range of ways in which we can start to unpack this broad and complex field with some initial thinking set out below that shows perhaps this is less to do with some kind of fault on our part and more the inevitable outcome of navigating complex environments:

Directed attention: Of course, anything that is fake often operates in a context where people are suggesting that it is anything but.  Widespread commentary about technology can often imply sentience: the humanizing of robots is widespread, with language used that subtly implies they have agency, human capabilities and sensitivities, or even overtly modelling AI against human brains (i.e., nature of ‘AI learning’ or Artificial Neural Networks, are inspired by human counterparts) .  So it is not necessarily a failure of our ability to spot fakes. As is the case with not spotting a gorilla when we are counting basketball passes, we are not necessarily looking for fakes if our attention is guided to look at the world in a different way.

Lack of comparisons:  Tech advocate and critic Jaron Lanier suggests it can be hard to evaluate the effectiveness of AI. Of course, AI results look impressive but on the other hand, it is hard to know how well it performs versus other much more straightforward methods. We could, for example, show people the best-selling books in the category that they have recently made a purchase. Would this perform just as well? The answer is that we do not know because there is no baseline for us to compare this to.  They may be better but much of the time we simply do not know – which means it can be hard to evaluate just how good AI is versus other methods.

Reliance on others:  We do not live in a world in which we have the luxury of first order evidence: we do not have the time or capability to ourselves check absolutely everything.  We necessarily need to rely on others, and will trust certain sources or use certain cues to inform us about what we can rely on (or when we need to be more suspicious).  Knowing what these cues are is important – for example, appearing to have a degree of scientific authority or coming with a set of precise numbers (as is the case in the world cup predictions) it is reasonable that we are then less suspicious about the authenticity of claims. 

Challenging orthodox beliefs: Blake Lemoine identifies himself in the Washington Post article as a mystic Christian priest, suggesting he is sympathetic to a belief system that questions orthodox explanations about life. The mystical aspect of this reflects a knowledge which is often considered to be ‘rejected’, ‘supressed’ and ‘stigmatized’ by those in ‘authority’. As we have set out previously, we are often motivated when we find ourselves in an underdog position, wanting to question the authority of orthodox, dominant positions.  Of course, this can also apply to non-mystical beliefs just as easily: take the way in which crypto-currencies’ challenger / underdog status could well have been a key ingredient for the widespread enthusiasm that we saw.

None of these suggest a deficit in people, more that the task of establishing what is truth and what is fiction often requires a fair amount of work (and trust) - so we will inevitably sometimes get it wrong.

Unpacking suggestibility

More broadly, we can see that humans are suggestible beings, a finding that was viewed by early psychologists such as William McDougal as an indicator of our vulnerability to manipulation. Suggestible minds, in this prism, are overly influenced by what other people say.  But paradoxically, this capacity for suggestibility is also something to be celebrated as it is what makes learning, emotions, socialization, and social cohesion possible.

Growing up, and as we learn, we take our cues from each other; through such socialization the individual then emerges, capable of rationally checking the evidence supporting the propositions they entertain. This is the paradox of being human: if we avoid any kind of susceptibility to the possibility of becoming deluded or duped then it is very hard to live any kind of meaningful life. 

What is a fake anyway?

Moving the thinking even further, Patricia Kingori suggests the difference between real and fake is not as precise as we might assume. For example, how do we untangle the notions of what is genuine and what is fake when we can synthetically produce for £100 a diamond with the same carat, clarity and chemical composition as a natural diamond that would ordinarily sell for £10,000?  

Kingori also points out that the notion of fakes and authenticity is culturally specific, pointing out that in some Southeast Asian cultures they simply have no word for fake:

“Something is either a good copy or a bad one. And there is no ‘one’ – no concept of the pure, unattenuated original.”

In in parallel way, we can also challenge the degree to which people are actually duped. People often disbelieve the misinformation when presented to them. Belief is not necessarily a binary thing, we can hold it in different shades and degree.

The politics of what is real

There will always be a battle for what is considered ‘truth’, ‘genuine’, ‘real’ and what is a ‘mistruth’, ‘artificial’ and ‘fake’. Look at the narratives over the current rail strikes in the UK:  Holly Smith points out that the use of language such as “union barons” that are “behind the strike” provide an inaccurate characterisation of the way strikes work in practice.  But clearly many use such terms, reflecting their beliefs about the way that trades unions really operate.

In a similar way, as we have set out previously, the media can frame climate change in a way that accepts its existence, but justifies inaction or inadequate efforts to tackle it. 

Determining where the boundaries sit between what is real and what is fake is contested and the drawing of the boundary line is often a highly political act.

In conclusion

We have discussed the ways that humans can perfectly reasonably conclude that something is authentic when many others consider it is fake. That we have to rely on others to guide us through life and we need to be open and trusting if we are to operate in society, so we are inevitably vulnerable to being duped. But the notion that technology means this is a more pressing issue than at any other point in history, being open to challenge. The panic we are witnessing today about the impact of technology to drive fakes arguably mirrors the reaction to the arrival of telegraphy in the early 19th century.  The point is that these issues have always been with us, but perhaps the forms they take are changing.

More widely, we can see that untangling what is real and what is fake is not always straightforward. The lines are often blurry and political with humans often able, it seems, to hold quite a sophisticated position straddling some pretty nuanced lines. People often disbelieve the misinformation when presented to them. Belief is not necessarily a binary thing, we can hold it in different shades and degree.

Perhaps, as we collectively see these issues more clearly, there is a sense of epistemic uncertainty as we feel the loss of what may have seemed to have been a real, knowable world in the past.  This could be the price we pay for living in a more pluralistic environment where we can better understand that facts, truth and authenticity are in fact legitimately contested.

We often talk about misinformation in the context of politics and social policy, less often in relation to brands.  And yet misinformation in the commercial space can harm a brand’s reputation, with studies suggesting that the mere association with misinformation can potentially result in adverse financial consequences, boycotting of the brand and harmed perceptions of brand value. This week we are looking at the sorts of threats there are for brands (as opposed to public sector policy) and examine the broader considerations of looking at misinformation in this context.

There are a number of ways in which brands can be associated with misinformation. They can of course can be the target of campaigns, falling victim to claims that have no basis in reality.  In addition, there is a danger that programmatic advertising can lend validity to fake news stories by brand advertising appearing alongside them.

Another element, examined a paper by Caitlin Candice Ferreira, Jeandri Robertson and Marnell Kirsten, suggests that brands themselves may have a more active or unwitting role in misinformation than we may always consider.  This seems quite bold claim, but it does lead us to an important and necessary discussion about what we understand by what we understand by the term ‘misinformation’ and how the lines between this and legitimate marketing activities might be finer than we think.

Misinformation to discredit

We turn first to the most obvious case (as cited in the Ferreira et al paper) in which brands have been the target of misinformation campaigns, seeking to discredit the organisation.  One example of this is a 2015 video featuring ‘pink slime’, in which it is claimed that the ‘slime’ is the core ingredient of a leading fast-food brand’s chicken nuggets. 

With the video going viral, the brand launched a marketing campaign to counter the claims. Their ‘Know Our Food’ campaign aimed to offer transparent knowledge of their products and also encouraged people to do an online search for these claims, directing them to a website that fully explained and challenged the claims.  Videos were available where explicit mentions of the ‘pink slime’ were made before reassuring consumers of the false nature of these claims.

This seems a textbook example of how we might think about misinformation – a third party making false claims.  And also a textbook strategy of how to deal with it, providing a clear and robust challenge to these claims, in a very transparent way. 

But is it always this straightforward?

Misinformation or marketing?

In other cases the line between truth and misinformation is not always so simple.  While some misinformation is entirely fabricated, other misinformation may contain ‘kernels of information’ that may in fact be ‘internally constructed’. This suggests that the brand itself is involved (deliberately or unwittingly) with the creation or propagation of what could be viewed as misinformation.  While this seems quite a claim, we can perhaps better understand this through the example Ferreira gives of a British supermarket retailer. In 2016 this retailer was accused of using fictional farm names, such as ‘Woodside Farms’ and ‘Boswell Farms’ on their products. 

This, it was claimed by some, was an attempt to mislead shoppers into believing that produce was sourced from small-scale producers.  When questioned, the retailer pointed to their interim results, pointing out that the brands continued to be popular with consumers despite this being widely reported.   According to the paper, the retailer went on to suggest that all parties understand the concept is fake, meaning that the marketing activity was justified.  

This is a challenge to the traditional notion of fake and real – and in many ways references other work we have done which suggests that our relationship with ‘facts’ is more nuanced than we might initially think.  For example, when we asked people about a range of beliefs, (that are often considered conspiracy theories), such as ‘Princess Diana's death in a car crash was not accidental’, 40% of people considered it was ‘plausible’.  While this seems high, many of these people were not in fact fully signed up to this, with over half of those considering it plausible, also agreeing with this statement was ‘not strictly accurate but a reasonable challenge’.

Just how people understood these fictional farm names is a matter of some debate.  Whether people fully considered that the farms were in fact physical locations where the food came from or a marketing device is unclear.  But as the Princess Diana example shows, people are typically more nuanced in their beliefs than they are always given credit for. We need to be careful about assuming people are binary in their beliefs about what is ‘true’ and what is ‘false’.

In another example, Ferreira and colleagues set out the way that millions of consumers accused a mobile phone brand of deliberately slowing down older models. While this was initially denied, the brand later apologized for doing just this, but saying it was the unintentional consequence of software updates. They clearly stated that they would never do anything to intentionally shorten the lifespan of their products, spelling out that the slowdown was in fact intended to increase the lifespan of the products. Despite these explanations, (and a reduction in the prices of new batteries to resolve the problem), the delayed response from the brand appears, (according to Ferreira), to have sowed seeds of distrust amongst consumers.

Perhaps situations such as this are more common than we might expect.  Although not always as extreme, many industries are considered to be involved in misinformation about their impact of their activities on issues such as public health, climate change and pollution.  Indeed, in some cases the issues become undisputed, as was the case in the cover up of vehicle emissions by Volkswagen with the group's chief executive at the time, Martin Winterkorn, saying his company had "broken the trust of our customers and the public”.

But in other cases there are often fewer clear lines.  What might be considered by some to be legitimate marketing claims or explanations of business practices may be seen by others as fake news or misinformation. 

In conclusion

There are three key conclusions that we draw from this. First, what we consider to be ‘truth’ or fact’ in never entirely agreed on. One person’s misinformation is another person’s legitimate position. These lines are blurry and therefore what constitutes legitimate marketing practice versus misinformation activity can easily become contested ground.

Second, we need to be cautious about the degree to which people are vulnerable to misinformation. Some researchers point out that the degree to which people are manipulated by misinformation is overstated, as they do not necessarily believe what is presented to them. Indeed, as the British Royal Society have recently reported, it can be debated to what extent misinformation actually influences the public’s beliefs on a large scale.  

Third, as we saw at the outset, given that misinformation is considered to be a problem by the public (regardless of the degree to which this is in fact the case), then being associated with it is an issue for brands. Moreover, with influencers playing a role on shaping views and behaviours, the line between misinformation and opinion can become blurred. So much so that when Kylie Jenner made a comment about Snapchat ("sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad."), it wipes £1bn from the company’s share price.  Clearly, brands can be vulnerable to reputational harm, making the case for brands to understand misinformation.

In summary, just what is and is not misinformation is a blurry line.  As such, understanding the way in which the general public construe these terms, be able to assess when marketing activity risks appearing to be misinformation, and knowing how to deal with these claims are all critical issues for brands in managing their reputational risks.

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In misinformation wars it is not uncommon for people to adopt an underdog status, claiming that the beliefs and the facts they hold are being threatened by powerful forces.  Look at the way in which Trump, himself a billionaire, complains of being the victim of ‘Liberal elites’.  But also in other spheres such as wellness, those holding minority beliefs and challenging widely accepted scientific perspectives will often claim that their perspectives are being closed down by authorities. 

It might seem that strange that if you are hoping your claims to have influence, you would suggest you are the weaker party.  But on the contrary, this week we are exploring how the act of holding an ‘underdog’ set of beliefs can offer considerable impact.

The ‘underdog-effect’ is often used in a harmless manner but can also have negative consequences.  In drawing on different examples we will tease out what the mechanisms are, but in no way are we making judgements or inferences about the subject matter or the manner in which these strategies have been deployed.

New age and opposition to establishment beliefs

 We start off by looking at an area that has long had an underdog status, that of New Age beliefs, based around the notion of the spiritual authority of the self.  This area, according to Egil Asprem, has a huge range of different belief systems that lack an overarching institutionalized orthodoxy . This means people are able to move freely and quickly through what can, at first glance, appear to be distinct beliefs and practices.

Asprem writes about the long history of the way that ‘illegitimacy’ of certain beliefs offers them influence.  He suggests that the ‘cultic milieu’, the range of belief systems relating to mystical, occult and other spiritual practices, have for centuries been considered as knowledge which is ‘rejected’, ‘supressed’ and ‘stigmatized’ by those in ‘authority’.

The point, for our purposes, is that despite their lack of positively shared belief systems, they appear united and are actually given impetus through their shared opposition to ‘Establishment’ beliefs.

Brands and the underdog strategy

We can cast further light on this by switching context and looking at the way in which brands have long used an ‘underdog’ strategy to gain market share – through their opposition to a dominant competitor or type of offer.  Indeed, numerous anecdotal examples abound of brands that began as underdogs and became successful. These include the struggle of Avis against market leader Hertz in the sixties, Pepsi’s challenging of Coca-Cola in the seventies and eighties and Apple’s iconic rise to dominance in the nineties. 

Neeru Paharia and colleagues set out the way that marketers do not rely necessarily rely on consumers to infer their brands’ underdog status, but instead author their own underdog narratives.  These ‘brand biographies’ typically tell stories about the entrepreneurs (apparently) humble origins, struggling against the odds to build their businesses through hard graft and determination, despite lacking the resources of their monied competitors.

Holger J. Schmidt and Pieter Steenkamp built on this creating an ‘underdog brand management framework’. They illustrated this with an account of the way Apple’s successfully deployed this strategy, with their 1984 advertisement being a classic example. Of course, this is not limited to start-up brands – large and successful brands like Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft have at various points also adopted an underdog role, profiling ‘the humble garages in which they began’.

We are not for a moment suggesting that any brand deploying an underdog positioning is de-facto involved in misinformation – but this does allow us to see more clearly how this mechanism can be used to shape outcomes and energise people.

Underdog and social policy

Another interesting application of this strategy is from research by Christopher Bryan and colleagues where activating adolescent values was used as a way to fuel healthier eating behaviours. In their study, they created materials that reflected adolescent values of being socially conscious and autonomous through healthy eating, with messaging that challenged dominant companies which focused on the marketing of unhealthy snacks to the young and the less well off.

Positioning healthy eating as a defiant, underdog activity that bolstered adolescents’ autonomy and social justice, increasing the motivation to eat healthier foods and resulted in changing the behaviour of study participants.

Conspiracy theories

An important additional connection to make is the relationship between this underdog positioning and conspiracy theories. To examine this, we can return to New Age and other non-orthodox beliefs. Asprem points out how it is not difficult to see the way that conspiracy theories provide a common language in the face of ‘stigmatized knowledge claims’.  Conspiracy theorists suggest that if certain types of knowledge or beliefs are stigmatised, then there is a logic to identifying the way in which institutions that have conventionally been considered as the arbiters between ‘knowledge and error’ can be readily be considered to be ‘suppressing knowledge’. 

Indeed, conspiracy theorist Michael Barkun suggests that if people consider that their own ideas about knowledge are in conflict with orthodox notions, then it can be all to position the ‘forces of orthodoxy’ as seeking to challenge, vilify and delegitimize either out of self-interest or some other negative motive.

Hence, we can see the way in which perceptions of stigmatized knowledge can be closely related to conspiratorial thinking. This has also been highlighted by researchers Charlotte Ward and David Voas who identified this linkage between New Age spirituality and conspiracy thinking, describing it as ‘Conspirituality’.

Here is to the misfits

When we start looking at this issue, it was startling to see just how much the underdog mechanism is a hugely powerful part of Western culture. Indeed Joseph Campbell identified the underdog as a classic storyline (the Hero’s Journey) which is deeply embedded in many different films, creating feelings of empathy and hope as well as resentment and anger. 

Returning to Apple, have a read of the text to another of their adverts:

“Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes ... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. ... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. ... They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

It is easy to see the power of this positioning and the way in which adopting this underdog positioning can also set things up in opposition, creating a sense of need for widespread, fundamental change and perhaps even reflects a sense of resentment or defensiveness at the way in which one’s ‘underdog beliefs’ might be stigmatized or ridiculed. 

With this in mind, it may well be hard to engage or even influence the mindsets of people who have adopted this position.  Indeed, encountering ridicule and disbelief can very much be the expectation, reinforcing the narrative related to negative ‘forces of orthodoxy’.

Conclusions

It is surely quite confusing when groups that hold power identify themselves as the underdogs.  This is particularly the case in the political sphere, when politicians appear to show themselves as the victims, rather than operating from authority.  This can seem nonsensical as we might argue it undermines their authority. 

But by unpacking this ‘underdog-effect’ we can see the way in which it taps into a hugely powerful cultural narratives that can powerfully influence our response.  The underdog-effect may not always be deployed consciously and explicitly, but it is such an integral part of our cultural narrative that we may find it hard to see it clearly.

Nevertheless, this effect seems to be deployed in a wide variety of contexts: from teenagers eating vegetables, and brands using it as a means to encourage a devoted following, to politicians using it to shape sentiment on key policy areas and generate votes. 

Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out the way its use (knowingly or otherwise) has the potential to create hard-to-reconcile difference and binary oppositions.  People are often fully prepared to be seen as ‘crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers’, and while there is nothing wrong in this, there is a danger that the rhetoric of the positions held can drown out engagement and discussion between the positions.

This is important as we have talked about the value and power of public dialogue to tackle misinformation:  if we can identify when an underdog position is being taken and recognise the rhetorical impact that it has, then we can more easily find ways to mitigate impact on dialogue. 

The underdog effect is of course not the only mechanism that shapes misinformation, but we believe that it is a very important one that needs further focus and attention.

We have been reviewing the way we form our beliefs about the world on the range of pressing issue we face, from climate change and sustainability to vaccination and COVID safety.  There are so many complex problems which involve a huge amount of expertise to fully understand, we inevitably rely on others to help us.

We have looked at the explanation that people take a stance based on their political allegiances (one of the most common explanations) might be part of the answer, but it is far from the full story.  We then jumped into looking more closely at the social nature of belief and the way in which the environment can become ‘epistemically polluted’ as the cues that people use to make their decisions get manipulated.

Given it seems that beliefs have a strong social component, what does this mean for the way we support people to make effective decisions in the world and address the issue of misinformation?  One of the answers might be to reinforce the institutions that people reference when trying to understand what is true and support the reputation of these institutions and give them resources to better engage with people.  Ipsos data suggests that the notion that trust in institutions is eroding has been over-stated, so this certainly has something to recommend it. 

However, there is perhaps also a case to question whether the variety of institutions that we have historically looked to are actually best placed to engage with people – is there a sense in which we might over-rely on them at the expense of other approaches?

Empowering people

We consider that there is a case to be made for empowering people to have open, informed and considered dialogues between each other on the key issues that we face today.  Indeed, we see this ‘grass-roots’ (social) approach as a key way in which we can address many misinformation challenges.

Recall the way that Obama ran what is often described as a ‘grassroots campaign’ involving a dedicated group of interacting directly with people.  The Obama For America campaign trained 10,000 organizers who then worked on the 2014 and 2016 campaigns, gathered an email list of 30-million, had 3 million donors, and claimed 2 million active participants. It was the first time that a ‘bottom-up’, grassroots campaign was built at such a huge scale in such a short period of time.

The belief was ‘a dedicated group of volunteers with clear understanding of candidate’s vision, interacting directly with people, work better than any digital army’.  Technology didn’t replace ‘People to People’ connect but it helped to scale, get the message delivered instantly and also proved to be a powerful tool for fundraising.

Another example is the state of Taiwan which has put online collaboration at the centre of their democratic processes. The core premise is that government place their trust in people with the ability to set agenda.  Anyone can begin an e-petition on the platform. Once a case has 5,000 signatures, the relevant ministries must respond in public. In addition to lowering the barriers to democracy, it is considered that this approach is facilitates a process of mutual understanding leading to more participation.

We can go back even further to 1890’s left-of-centre agrarian Populism movement (before the term took on a very different meaning), which as accused of a ‘celebration of ignorance’ but in fact was a movement that historian Charles Postel called ‘progress through education’, with farmers readily listening to lectures, using the many lending libraries or indeed the universities that the movement set up.

While these approaches are not specifically about misinformation, they do illustrate how as humans we work well and are open to the ideas of others when we collectively work to navigate the shared knowledge community in which we live.  These are all examples of the way that collective acts, encouraging an open and considered dialogue on topics that are often contested, and in doing so offering useful ways for us to engage, work together towards positive outcomes. We think these approaches can be further developed to offer tangible solutions for tackling misinformation.

Suspicion of ‘crowds’

There is, however, often a wide-spread suspicion of people collectively working together to find positive outcomes.  We think crowd psychology is relevant here:  the ‘crowd’ has been considered irrational which has helped to undermine both the motivation and legitimacy of popular movements.  However, as Fergus Neville succinctly puts it:

“By a priori pathologizing alternative visions of society as irrational, any challenge to the hierarchical social and political status quo was rendered mindless, and the rejection of identities in traditional (unequal) systems was treated as a lack of identity per se”

Work by people such as Stephen Reicher suggest that an individual’s identity is not lost within the crowd, (with individuals becoming emotional and irrational) but rather there is a cognitive transformation from personal to social level identification.  Indeed, when participants see others in a crowd as sharing their social identity then there is a sense of connectedness and recognition.  This reinforces the notion of ‘crowds’ (in all the forms they take) as places where we share information, plan together, jointly carry out plans, monitor each other’s progress and adjust accordingly. The crowd can, in fact, have huge benefits for us.

Conclusions

We make the case for people working together to more explicitly and openly engage in thinking, sharing different perspectives and talking to find shared spaces of commonality and understanding.  Of course this is not always the whole story and we continue to need institutions be trusted sources, we inevitably see the way that people can get hung up on ‘sacred’ beliefs that are hard to shift and there are inevitably bad-actors. 

But we consider that a useful direction for both governments and brands to explore how they can support these sorts of ‘people-led’ approaches to tackling misinformation. This not only requires a shift in the way we can create opportunities for people to ‘think together’ but also requires of us a willingness to think of people as capable of working together to find solutions.

Understanding how we form beliefs is critical if we are to understand the reasons for misinformation and how to address it. Last week we challenged the notion of motivated reasoning – the idea that our beliefs are simply the by-product of our political perspective.   Instead we consider that our beliefs have a significant social element to them – and while this is critical for human flourishing, the very same mechanism can lead us astray. 

Neil Levy sets out the way in which as humans we live in a ‘cumulative culture’ in which our collective, shared knowledge has a type of a ‘ratchet effect’.  This means we are not all having to learn anew each time, instead our collective knowledge becomes a shared platform on which others can build.  For example, we do not need to learn about vaccines anew each time, we have a collective understanding of what they are and how they work.  This means that when a vaccine becomes available for a new condition, then we can consider this particular application rather than having to be educated about vaccines from scratch.

The adaptive benefits of social cultural cognition

It is this shared mechanism that means humans are able to achieve far more than any individual or indeed any generation can achieve. Levy sets out the way that the evolution of cultural knowledge means that we are able to detect signal in noise when the degree of noise is greater than the capability of our individual cognition to analyse.  By this we mean that when the relationship between an action and the effects are slow to become apparent and are probabilistic then, as individuals, we find it difficult to tease out the relationships. 

One example of this is the length of time it took to establish the impact of tobacco on health; for many years, people challenged any link between smoking and cancer, as the public was more focused on prominent cases of people who had lived to old age despite being heavy smokers. Of course, science provides tools for identifying signal in the noisy association between variables, such as that between smoking and cancer. Without these tools, our own individual cognition is unreliable. But cultural cognition often succeeds in identifying the signal amid the noise without the need for statistical tools.

Levy gives the example of traditional Arctic life which requires knowledge of how to make particular clothing, build and use tools for hunting, make snow houses, build fires and so on. The know-how needed for any one of these elements is hard to acquire and each are of little use by themselves. Acquiring and using this sort of knowledge is something that is built of over generations to the extent that it is then part of what we do to live, manage risk and flourish as humans.  We could apply the same principles to our day to day lives – education, social skills, employment capabilities, eating and exercising well and so on are things that of course we can build on and look for help with but at the same time are an engrained part of how we have learned to live well. 

What we know is not always explicit

Of course, these deep social knowledge and practices may well be partially opaque to those who inherit them. When things suddenly change then we can see this a little more clearly:  COVID has perhaps shown us think how many things we do that we do not examine particularly deeply such as hand shaking.  The advice to avoid hand shaking suddenly allowed us to see the complex set of human needs that are met through this simple act – but that it is so embedded that we simply do not see them in everyday life.

Acquiring this social knowledge is something that is often not explicitly taught – we simply take them on trust – this is how things are done, so this is how I will do it.  We acquire the norms, customs and conventions of those around us. Levy points out that the conformist bias helps us to acquire the local conventions and norms, and the prestige bias leads us to imitate particularly successful individuals.  But rather than this ‘social referencing’ being a reflection of our inherent irrationality and some kind of deficit, it is in fact a highly adaptive means by which we acquire all-important shared knowledge.

 And this is not something that we necessarily accept unthinkingly.  On the contrary, we are selective in who we look to, filtering out information from out-group members when there is evidence that it conflicts with the majority view, and when it comes from those known to be unreliable or untrustworthy.  This is intelligent, rational behaviour rather than unreflective and automatic.

Snowballing nature of belief change

This social referencing means that changes of mind can ‘snowball’ as shifts in belief can create additional shifts, resulting in rapid changes.  This is in no small part because we do not, and cannot hope to, have access to ‘first order representations’.  The vast majority of the population accept that vaccines can prevent illness but have little understanding of how they actually do this.  Similarly, many of us “believe in” evolution but have little understanding of the theory or the mechanisms involved.  But as Levy points out, this indistinctness is not a bug, but a feature: a deep understanding the science is very hard so having indistinct concepts allows us to defer to the experts.

This has also been called has called the ‘paradox of the psychosocial’; we can think of people as being suggestible if they accept knowledge from others as true, despite lack of evidence. Instead of living in the real world, suggestible people attract our disapproval as they are overly influenced by the things other people say, do and want. `But on the other hand, this very same capacity is seen as something to be celebrated given it is that which makes learning, affection, socialization and social cohesion possible at all.

Epistemic pollution

This outsourcing of the detail allows us to operate effectively through the use of indistinct meta-beliefs, building on the work of others in our community and wider society. But it also has a vulnerability.   Once others know the cues we use to determine how to respond to the information we receive, then we are vulnerable to having our environment ‘epistemically polluted’ as others knowingly or unwittingly use these cues for influence.

There are many ways in which our ‘epistemic’ (knowledge) environment may be polluted such as the use of supposedly neutral think tanks that are in fact funded by particular interest groups, predatory publishers, who publish low-quality scientific research for a fee, and, as we have flagged previously, the way in which issues are knowingly framed in the media in ways that represent the interest of only a few, can all influence what we believe.

We can of course also go further than this to examine the way in which ‘information warfare’ is taking place with purposeful attempts to shape agendas and undermine confidence in the other side’s narrative.  We can see this playing out in many areas, not least in the current evolving situation with the Ukraine.

Conclusions

Understanding the social nature of knowledge is looking critical for us to understand how to navigate misinformation.  Much of the focus to date has been to examine the capability of the individual – trying to find a deficit on the cognition or finding fault on their motivations.  If this is the assessment, then the solutions are all about finding ways to mitigate these flaws so that we can be more vigilant and better ‘trained’. 

However, while this may be some of the solution, there is a mounting body of evidence that points away from the individual specially and more focused on the way in which we are able to navigate the wider shared knowledge community in which we live (see here for more background).

With the social nature of knowledge as a key diagnosis then the prescription for a ‘cure’ is surely pointing towards collective action, encouraging an open and considered dialogue on topics that are contested.  We will explore this topic in greater detail in next week’s posting. 

One of the biggest challenges of our time is how and why do we hold beliefs that, on the face of it, seem counter-intuitive and irrational.  Why do some people still challenge the science of climate change or at the very least assume there is little that can be done to change things?  When the evidence for the value of mask wearing and vaccination programmes is so great, why do the streets of Ottawa continue to be blocked by people protesting against them? 

Over the next couple of issues, will be looking at how we form our beliefs and what behavioural science can do to engage effectively in the debates and help unlock some of these big challenges that we face. 

Do we have a deficit in our rationality?

We start our exploration with what is probably the most popular explanation of ‘problematic beliefs’ -  the notion that as humans we have rationality deficits due to the way how information is processed.  If we find a conclusion unpalatable, then we are motivated to martial our intellectual capabilities to find ways to reject it.

One of the key ways in which psychologists tend to explain motivated reasoning is through political polarisation.  As we have outlined previously, one the main advocates of this is Dan Kahan, whose identity-protective cognition framework.

He makes a case for the way in which the cultural values we hold define our social identities – which in turn then shape our beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether humans are responsible for climate change; whether the death penalty prevents murder).

This helps to explain why groups with different cultural outlooks (such as left or right of centre political orientation) disagree about important societal issues.  On this basis disagreement is not due to people failing to understand the science or even that they lack relevant information. Instead, according to Kahan, disagreement is generated from the way “people endorse whichever position reinforces their connection to others with whom they share important ties”.

Kahan suggests this is a form of motivated reasoning; advocating beliefs that are not consistent with the sentiment in one’s group could threaten one’s position within the group, in which case people may be motivated to “protect” their cultural identities.

But is this really quite the case? 

Philosopher Neil Levy sets out a challenge to Kahan’s account.  He suggests that ‘bad belief’ formation does not inevitably correlate with identity. For example, there has been little evidence (at least historically) that anti-vaxx sentiment, or indeed opposition to genetically modified organisms is predicted by group identity.

He suggests that there are, of course, some beliefs that are predicated on our identities, particularly when those beliefs are core to the nature of the identity.  Evolution, for example is a case in point: while some theological views are consistent with evolution, others are passionately committed to a story of creation where God created the world in seven days. For this group of believers, evolution is clearly inherently threatening to this ‘identity-constitutive commitment’.

But, as Levy suggests, other cases such as climate change are less clear. As he points out, the notion of climate change can be threatening to those who support free markets, as any adequate response would involve heavy regulation of the market.  However, when we dig into it we can see that there is not necessarily an inherent requirement for those to the political right to object to climate change. 

There is almost always a gap between our ideological stance and any policy position. For instance, most people who call themselves fiscal conservatives actually express as much support for government spending as those who don’t think of themselves as fiscally conservative.  And on the topic of climate change, Levy describes how only fairly recently there was no partisan divide on the environment, either between politicians or among the general public in the United States.

This would suggest the opposite of Kahan – that we rarely reject something due to conflict between ideology and policy.  Levy goes onto point out that the same right of centre that frets about market interference strongly supports subsidies to fossil fuel interests. 

So while the rhetoric might be that climate change is threatening because it interferes with the market, those who engage in the rhetoric seem willing to interfere with the market to see off the threat.  In other words, if we were to accept motivated reasoning as the central plank of why people adopt the extreme beliefs we are seeing, then surely we would expect there to be much more broader consistency between tribal ideologies and the policy positions:  the evidence does appear to call this into question. 

This is not to say that a motivated reasoning explanation is wrong – but simply that it is not the full explanation of why we find people adopting positions which seem so much at odds with what we might expect.

So how do come to form ‘bad beliefs?

If we are challenging the more popular position in belief formation then do we have a decent alternative account?  We have previously mentioned, counter to Kahan, that when prior beliefs are taken into account then deliberation actually helps people to properly evaluate new climate information. 

We will set out the way in which our beliefs have a significant social element to them – which is in fact critical for our success as humans:  relying on others for knowledge is inevitable for human flourishing.  But in addition we will set out the way in which we glean knowledge and beliefs from others can lead to, as outlined by Levy, ‘epistemic pollution’:  where cues we use for knowledge from others can lead us astray.   

97% of the world’s top climate scientists maintain the evidence-informed view that the Earth is warming due to human activity.  Despite this, recent Ipsos polling found that 25% agreed that “Climate change exists but it is not caused by human activity” and 7% agreed with the statement “There is no climate change”. 

At times it can seems as if no matter how much evidence is given to people about the existential dangers we face, there is a refusal to shift from their beliefs.  It seems to be the precise opposite of a rational outlook to the world.   Even among people that understand human climate change is a given, there often seems a lack of ‘follow-though’ in terms of changing behaviour - in the same study, Ipsos found one third of people consider a solution will come through technological innovation (there is no known solution currently). 

To unpack what is going on, this week we are drawing on a paper by Bence Bago, David G. Rand and Gordon Pennycook - who have drawn some very powerful conclusions about how best to engage with those on the ‘other side of the fence’.

Political partisanship

Are we destined to be irrational and incapable of absorbing information to make informed decisions?  One of the most commonly cited reasons for climate change denial is political partisanship. In the US in particular, people on the right of the political spectrum are more likely to consider climate change is either a hoax or is not caused by human activities.  In addition, people with superior numerical ability and cognitive sophistication demonstrate increased political-allegiance differences in climate change beliefs, rather than higher agreement with the scientific consensus.  Hence, stronger cognitive capability seems to not protect against climate misperceptions; but instead, it may reinforce views that support one’s political identities.

Identity-protective cognition

Dan Kahan’s identity-protective cognition framework is perhaps the most frequently cited explanation for this.  This can be understood from the perspective of the dual process theory which differentiates two types of reasoning process: intuition (System 1) and deliberation (System 2).   It is well known that intuition is a low-effort, fast, ‘automatic’, response to stimuli, whilst deliberation requires more effort and is a time-consuming process. The identity-protective cognition framework considers that cognitive abilities are associated with greater polarization because deliberation enables motivated reasoning: when we find new evidence, participating in deliberation allows the discrediting of evidence if it is not consistent with identity and political orientation.  Given there are significant political differences concerning what evidence is considered credible, this leads to polarization in beliefs.

Translating this into the language of dual process theory, deliberative reasoning processes are sparked to rationalize identity-consistent intuitive instincts. On the specific topic of climate change, this means that deliberation leads Republicans to discard evidence in favour of climate change (to protect their partisan identity), while deliberation means Democrats reject evidence challenging climate change.  If more cognitively sophisticated people engage in more deliberation, then we would expect them to be better at aligning their evaluation of evidence about climate change with their respective political allegiances.

This theory has huge practical importance because, if it is indeed the case, strategies such as educating people, or making them deliberate, will not be effective against climate change denial.  Similarly, this is used as an argument for not engaging with other forms of misinformation and Conspiracy Theories – the notion here is that challenging these beliefs will not work and may even serve to increase partisan differences.

Are we really blinded by partisanship?

However, in their recent paper, Bence Bago, David G. Rand and Gordon Pennycook challenge this account and make the case for educating people and participating in the debate with people that hold different views to our own.  Their research suggests that people are not in fact ‘blinded by partisanship’ but are instead making a good-faith effort to form accurate beliefs.

The case for this is based on challenging two significant assumptions within the identity-protective cognition framework. First, the set out that political identity is confounded with - but is clearly distinct from - prior beliefs about climate change. Democrats are much more likely to believe that climate change is caused by human activity than Republicans (and vice versa), indicating that partisanship and prior factual beliefs are correlated. However, prior beliefs are not entirely consistent with political affiliation.   Although many Republicans believe that human activity contributes to global warming, at least to some degree, many do not.  Similarly, not all Democrats reject this notion. 

This is a somewhat problematic finding for the identity-protective cognition framework, because if our position on climate change is driven by politically motivated reasoning then we must be able to de-facto demonstrate that partisanship influences information evaluation, above and beyond the impact of prior beliefs about the specific topic. Of course, our prior beliefs may be influenced by a range of other factors such as family environment or life experiences and it may be these that also influence partisanship. Which means that effects driven by prior beliefs do not provide direct or compelling evidence for politically motivated reasoning.

In addition, past research on motivated System 2 reasoning has relied upon correlating individual differences in cognitive sophistication with degree of partisan differences on politicized issues.  However, again there is some confounding taking place – people scoring higher on cognitive sophistication scales are better at deliberation than people scoring lower on these scales, but importantly they also tend to differ in many other aspects. We cannot ignore the wider way in which people with lower (or higher) cognitive sophistication may have different social, cultural and political influences on their reasoning. 

In a series of ingenious experiments, Bago and colleagues accounted for prior beliefs (which are clearly different from partisanship per se), and experimentally manipulated extent of reasoning (using cognitive load and time pressure) rather than relying on correlations with individual differences in reasoning.

Their results are hugely important: they show that once these factors are accounted for, deliberation does not in fact increase reliance on partisan consistency - hence reasoning did not lead most Republicans to reject climate change or Democrats to reject evidence challenging climate change. 

Evaluating new evidence

Instead, they found that deliberation increased the consistency between evaluation of new climate information and pre-existing beliefs about climate change. They point out that while evaluating new evidence in light of prior beliefs is often called “confirmation bias”, it can of course  be entirely reasonable to conclude that the information source is unreliable rather than that the accumulation of all your prior knowledge is incorrect. As they point out, if a stranger tells you that they were abducted by aliens, is it not irrational to conclude that that information is probably unreliable! Bayesian style analysis demonstrates that we always start with priors in which we assess new information but that it can be updated - there is potential for change.

This suggests we need to take a fundamentally different approach to tackling misinformation and conspiracy theories.  If people are engaging in ‘good-faith efforts’ to consider information accurately and relying on their prior beliefs to guide such judgments, then educational interventions could - in the long run - move people’s priors and increase agreement with the scientific consensus.

Conclusions

Although we have looked at this issue relating to climate denial, the implications are far wider.  The widespread acceptance of the identity-protective cognition framework has arguably led to a policy of not engaging with a range of misinformation or conspiracy theorising.  The problem here, as we have pointed out previously, is that this can lead to information vacuums where people simply do not have any real opportunity to deliberate and have their prior beliefs challenged. 

Of course, as the authors point out, simply getting people to think more carefully will not in itself make people more likely to believe in the threat of climate change. But if people are indeed engaging on a good-faith basis to assess new information correctly, and relying on their prior beliefs to drive their judgments, then education could move people’s beliefs and improve agreement with the scientific consensus.

Supporting this is the way in which studies are showing the impact on the general public’s attitudes from the way the media frames climate change. A growing body of experimental research has demonstrated the way in which different frames in climate communication can affect attitudes and behaviour.

The point is that having the debate matters – we do not need to accept the bleak conclusion that we are destined to remain within the limits of our political, value-based allegiances.

Conspiracy theories remain a topic that fascinate and disturb us.  They are often identified as responsible for a range of societal ills including people hesitating about getting vaccinated, concerned that it is a government plot to control the population, or 5G masts are being toppled as protestors consider the frequency is responsible for COVID.  This is not purely a public policy issue either:  many of these issues directly impact brands (e.g. 5G masts) and there is increasing evidence that businesses are being targeted with Conspiracy Theories and disinformation.

The social sciences have often tended to explain this phenomena with a focus on a ‘conspiracy mentality’,   dispositions that mean people are vulnerable to misinformation.  Cass Sunstein has called this a ‘crippled epistemology’, the notion that we are vulnerable to limitations in the way we process information.   One example of this is motivated reasoning, where people appear to process information in a way that is fits with their pre-existing emotions and inclinations.  Karen Douglas has talked about motivated ignorance and identified three types:

• Epistemic – the desire for an explanation, certainty and simplicity

• Existential – the desire to be safe and secure and have control

• Social – the desire to fit in and feel good about ourselves

Others have pointed to the way conspiracy theories are the inevitable consequence of modern challenges such as political secrecy, surveillance, the rise of global corporations, the reduced sense of personal agency.  This suggests a mismatch between the complex systems shaping our lives and the limited, individual-agency oriented, explanations we have available which results in conspiracy theorising.

Another evolving perspective is that conspiracy theories are the inevitable arguments and debates we all have about what to believe.  This approach suggests conspiracy theories are the result of long held  patterns of thought and challenges to official explanations,  and as such can be understood through wider political, social and cultural positions. 

As such we move from an explanation of conspiracy theories as being the individual mind and towards the content – both the theory itself but also the social nature of thought.   This references the field of sociocultural psychology, which seeks to capture the “cultural” nature of human experience. On this basis, if culture is to humans what the water is for the eyes of fish (as set out by Jerome Bruner), then, as psychologists, we need to understand this ‘water’ (our culture) and the eye (our minds) as well as the relationship between them. 

This is certainly consistent with the ‘we’ behavioural science theme that we often talk about on Frontline and perhaps, more than ever, references what Moscovici called ‘the thinking society’ where we can see the way ideologies, worldviews and cultural norms produce and maintain particular patterns of thinking and behaviour.  We might also seek to explain some of the recent discussion of ‘folklore’ explanations of conspiracy theories using the discipline of sociocultural psychology.

There is clearly a huge amount of literature on possible causes of Conspiracy Theories with a focus on those who develop and perpetuate them but there has been a relatively limited degree of investigation into the wider public’s relationship with them. 

To explore this, Ipsos MORI is launching a report on the way the general public engages with Conspiracy Theories, both to understand the nature of this important challenge, but also to identify how to tackle this important issue. 

The report draws on survey work with over four thousand members of the UK general population and seeks to build a nuanced understanding of the issues.  The data certainly suggests that the wider public have a high degree of awareness and engagement with many conspiracy theories, that may be a surprise to some. 

With this in mind, there is a the case for governments and brands to avoid ‘othering’ people who engage with these beliefs, not least as they are a significant proportion of the population. Not only that but we need to recognise the nuanced relationship that many have with conspiracy theories: according to the data, while many may consider at least some conspiracy theories plausible, at the same time we may well not fully believe them but nevertheless regard them as a reasonable challenge to official explanations. 

There suggests a case for governments and brands to understand and engage with the content itself. If we ignore, or attempt to close-down discussion, this inevitably drives the issue underground and causes information vacuums - where there are no voices to help people understand the different sides to the debates. 

People may well have some challenges engaging and making sense of information in this complex world - but to tackle conspiracy theories effectively we surely need to properly understand the source of the beliefs, establish how people are engaging with them and then locate ourselves firmly within the debate.

The forthcoming report will be launched with a webinar – do sign up to hear more.  The report itself will be available for download following the event. 

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Much is written about the apparent irrationality of people who appear to believe in a position which seems to be very much at odds with the facts of a situation.  For example, climate denial is often explained as being based on how people process scientific information about climate in a way that conforms to pre-existing feelings and beliefs.  We are motivated to deny the facts that are at odds with our beliefs as they feel threating and we would prefer to avoid them.

While this is surely part of the reason that people avoid to engage with certain types of information, can we be confident that this is the only reason?  Something that perhaps does not always get sufficiently close attention is the nature of belief itself.  It is all too easy for us to assume that someone else’s beliefs are fully formed and developed – your belief in something means that you have a thorough formed belief.  But it is not quite a simple as that.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci recently published a column in the New York Times looking at the beliefs of people in the US who were unvaccinated for COVID.  She was referencing research from the COVID States Project, an academic consortium that managed to collates resources for regular polling. 

One of their findings was that a significant portion of the unvaccinated public was confused and concerned, rather than absolutely opposed to vaccines.   In fact, they found that only about 12 percent of the unvaccinated considered they would not benefit from a vaccine. Indeed, many of the unvaccinated had other health conditions and were worried about adverse reactions.  We have seen the exact same issue play out with pregnant women, with recent figures from England, finding one in six critically ill patients are unvaccinated pregnant women with Covid. 

What these figures point towards is less that those who are unvaccinated are adamant in their beliefs opposing vaccination but instead have legitimate concerns and are often struggling to work out the best course of action.  In this context belief is multi-shaded not a simple response to the question of do you believe? It is a far more graded and complex response, rather than a discrete yes or no response.

And of course, let’s not forget that beliefs change over time.  Ipsos polling found ‘vaccine hesitancy’ for COVID-19 dropping over the course of the pandemic.   Sometimes we need time to decide what we believe.

Belief styles

There are surely many ways in which our beliefs can be quite nuanced.  We examined the different ‘styles’ of belief we come up against in a variety of the work we do and observed a number of ways these styles appear:

• Suspension of disbelief:  We know not to look too closely at something – we think that overall it is a good thing (e.g. recycling) but aware of possible discrepancies (e.g. being poorly disposed of) that may or may not lead us to question our positive beliefs.  We are aware of the possible conflicts but this does not make our belief in the value of recycling any less valid.  There are a great many beliefs that we have that could be challenged yet they serve us sufficiently well that we do not need to interrogate them too closely (political representation, eating meat)

• Inconsistent beliefs:  Linked to this, we may hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time.  We may know that wild fires are a natural phenomenon that predates climate change; but also that the fires we see in many areas today are of a much greater intensity and frequency.  Exactly which is responsible cannot really be picked out, we can only really see the patterns emerging at a more macro-level, so it is not unreasonably to either hold both as true for even consider that the fire you have experience is a normal wild fire.

• Off-loading beliefs to others:  Much of the time our beliefs about how things work is not something that we each individually work out, but we rely on a community of knowledge to work on our behalf.  How many of us can be sure that our beliefs are correct about how vaccines work or indeed even how a zipper work. If we are questioned, then we recognise that our belief about how something works is tenuous but we have a good enough sense of it that allows us to function. 

• Unformed beliefs: Sometimes we have not quite worked out what our beliefs are about something, which means that we may well move about in those beliefs or in the strength to which we hold onto them.  The vaccination example outlined earlier is a good case in point.

• Not sure fully believe it but ‘there is something in it’ beliefs:  Recent work we have been doing on Conspiracy Theories suggests that people may consider something is believable (e.g. Princess Diana’s death in a car crash was not accidental) but at the same time, in a different question then say they ‘do not fully believe it but there is something in it’.  So what might seem like a belief is actually something much more akin to a questioning stance.

This informal collection of ‘belief styles’ inevitably has some overlap between them but nevertheless shows the way in which, when we look closely, beliefs are not quite as one dimensional as we might sometimes expect them to be.  

Conclusions

Of course, there will always be a proportion of the population that hold beliefs in a more definitive manner.  They may also vigorously promote those beliefs and as such attract our attention.  But we need to be wary about assuming that a small and more vocal group reflects the way most people hold their beliefs. 

When we see commentary that people are in denial, perhaps we should question what that actually means, for implicit in the assertion is the notion that people are firm in a particular belief.  But can we really believe that is necessarily so?  We suggest thoughtful survey work is needed to unpick, not only what people believe, but the manner in which they hold that belief.

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We tend to think of conspiracy theories as something that are the preserve of a small number of isolated individuals alone in their rooms distributing their beliefs online. Recent (soon to be released) work we have been doing at Ipsos, challenges that notion: instead we see the way that the general population tend to get involved in discussion of conspiracy theories. Academics Uscinski and Parent pointed out in 2014, that most people hold different degrees of Conspiracy Theory beliefs.  “Conspiracy theories permeate all parts of American society,” they wrote, “and cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.” But why is this?

The engaging nature of conspiracy theories

Part of the reason for the widespread engagement is that conspiracy theories are often engaging and provoke emotions - part of the fabric of our conversational lives. There is conversational value in discussing whether the Earth is flat, if Prince Charles is a vampire, the possibility that Princess Diana faked her own death, and that notion that world is run by a cabal of lizards that have taken human form.

Engaging in activities together is something that humans have always done: Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, ‘Dancing in the Street’ examines the nature of the sort of group interaction that we can at times see conspiracy theories inspiring, when she talks about carnival and the way group dancing levels and bonds human society.  As we move synchronously to music or chanting voices, the rivalries and differences that might divide us either transform into innocuous competition over our prowess as a dancer or forgotten altogether. 

Taking that theme, Ehrenreich sets out the way that medieval carnivals were not only rambunctious affairs of people dancing in unison, but they also readily mocked the authorities with ‘rituals of inversion”.  There may for example, by a king of fools or dancers costumed as priests and nuns.   There is a rich history of subordinate groups temporarily taking the roles of their social superiors. During Saturnalia, a Roman pagan festival, masters had to wait on their slaves; carnival allowed peasants to impersonate kings.

A carnival side to conspiracy theories?

We can perhaps see something similar with conspiracy theories – as commentators and theorists we necessarily tend to talk about conspiracy theories in quite sober terms, commenting on the way the promulgate often dangerous ideas such as discouraging people to get vaccinated.  However, we are also seeing the way in which conspiracy theories are often ‘carnivalesque’ in character, perhaps appropriating the very same ‘rituals of inversion’ that we saw in the carnivals of medieval Europe.  Take this meme of Bill Gates:  it is clearly of poor taste on a number of levels but nevertheless we can observe that humour is being used to poke fun at the recently divorced Gates while at the same time referencing a popular conspiracy theory that COVID vaccination is a cover for injecting the population with microchips.

Ehrenreich suggests that the rude mockery of carnival highlights their political ambiguity.  On the one hand it might service as a fundamental challenge to the status quo but could also be seen as a simple safety valve for discontent.  The maypole, around which so many traditional French and English festivities were based, was often a signal of defiance and a call to action. In England, football could provide an excuse for assembling and a cover for challenges to authority – in each case, social clashes ‘coincided’ with carnival.  And we surely see this play out in the Bill Gates meme –referencing conspiratorial, subversive beliefs but at the same time poking fun by intertwining and inverting a number of shared meanings and cultural references.

 It is this tension that Ehrenreich suggests is the basis for centuries of repression of carnival, being replaced instead with what she calls ‘spectacles’, festivities organised by authorities in which the masses are no longer active participants but merely spectators.  Nevertheless, carnival style activities keep bubbling up: whether rock rebellion of the 60’s, sporting events (as we saw in the UK engagement of their relative success in Euro2020) and raves.

There is a case to add engagement with conspiracy theories to these mass participation activities - our  research shows that people do not necessarily take the claims that are made entirely seriously, but instead see them as something that is often engaging and interesting while at the same time representing a reasonable question or a fair challenge to authority. 

In conclusion

Conspiracy theories as carnival might seem to understate the potentially problematic nature of many conspiracy theories - but only if we ignore the way in which carnival has always had under-currents that challenge more widely accepted knowledge and other power structures.   To effectively engage and counter the more problematic aspect of some conspiracy theories, we need to recognise and understand their often carnival-style content and delivery, to which many are drawn.

There is a great deal of speculation about the impact of technology on attitudes and behaviours.  Recently the Duke of Sussex blamed overwhelming “mass-scale misinformation” for Covid vaccine hesitancy when he presented an award to the team behind the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab.  Justin Trudeau accused far right group Rebel News of spreading misinformation about coronavirus vaccines and contributing to the growing number of protests across the country.

At face value, it is not an unreasonable assertion that the blame for conspiracy theories should be laid at the door of social media.  After all, the last two decades have seen a significant rise in disinformation on the web:  a casual browsing of YouTube will quickly allow you to encounter a wide range of Conspiracy Theory materials.  Indeed, recent Ipsos polling suggests 26% of the UK population claim they have heard COVID anti-vax messages on social media and, of this group, 42% say they shared such messages – equal to around 11% of the population overall.

This is certainly consistent with the position of Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari who considers that social media has a powerful and disturbing potential to persuade us of a wide range of belief:  he recently was quoted as saying:

“There is a lot of talk of hacking computers, smartphones, computers, emails, bank accounts, but the really big thing is hacking human beings, if you have enough data about me and enough computer power and biological knowledge, you can hack my body, my brain, my life.  You can reach a point where you know me better than I know myself.”

There have been some significant milestones that support the notion that technology is responsible for shaping our beliefs.  The Netflix film The Social Dilemma and Shoshana Zuboff’s book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, both set out the case for the ability of social media firms to directly influence our thoughts. 

But do we need some caution in pointing the finger too firmly at social media?  Technology critic Cory Doctrow suggests these critiques lack much convincing evidence to support their case.   For example, Zuboff cites a Facebook study in which people who were given more negative posts were shown to be more likely to make their own negative posts whilst people give more positive posts were more likely to make positive ones. While there is clearly a case to be made (albeit one which is also contested) the impact is not a large one. The findings were statistically significant but likely only because they had enormous sample sizes — in one study, 689,003 people —the effect sizes were small (in that same study, Cohen’s d = 0.02).

So while claims are made about the impact of technology as a key reason for the increase in Conspiracy Theories and disinformation generally, there remains a lack of convincing evidence that this is necessarily the case.

Clearly trying to disentangle the societal impact of different information sources on society at large is never going to be an easy task.  But in one of the relatively few well-resourced and solid pieces of work done in this space, the Harvard Berkman Klein Center analysed allegations relating to voter mail-in fraud which was a huge controversy in the 2020 US presidential election.  The researchers concluded that this issue was part of a systematic campaign amplified by a wide range of traditional media outlets. They suggested that Fox News, a right-wing television network, was more influential in spreading beliefs about voter mail-in fraud than social media, concluding:

“Our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in, and the legitimacy of, the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary role.”

This supports another study conducted in 2017 which found greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups.

These findings perhaps support claims that technology’s persuasive powers are often overstated.  Criti-hype is a term that has recently gained some prominence, suggesting that tales of the dangers of a new technology serve the purpose of effectively promoting its purported power. 

Clearly social media bears some of the responsibility for the spread of misinformation but there does seem to be a case for looking more widely for the causes of this phenomenon.