Who Turned Down the Lights?

Why navigating gaslighting is vital in a misinformed world.

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.