{"id":13746,"date":"2020-06-25T10:50:15","date_gmt":"2020-06-25T08:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/?p=13746"},"modified":"2023-07-22T13:58:04","modified_gmt":"2023-07-22T11:58:04","slug":"truth-is-not-always-the-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/webinars\/cultural-evolution-in-the-digital-age\/truth-is-not-always-the-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Truth is not always the point"},"content":{"rendered":"Thank you, Alberto, for writing this book! In addition to being a captivating reading, it shed light on some thoughts I had on how people share information on social media, and what truth has to do with it. I outline these thoughts, hoping that they can be refined in the general discussion.\n\nOne of the objectives of Alberto’s book is to show that one can have a reading of digital phenomena very different from the usual one, which highlights the difficulty of keeping a critical mind in a world overwhelmed by information of uneven quality. And indeed, there is a lot of convincing evidence, gathered in the book, against the fashionable idea that, for lack of time and critical thinking, humans of the 21st<\/sup> century are, in general, more vulnerable to misinformation. If an idea successfully spreads on the web, it is because favourable ground was present in the first place, not because we readily accept information encountered on social media (as argued by Hugo Mercier in \u201cNot born Yesterday\u201d). This also applies to misinformation. If someone shares some fake news (for example, that a study demonstrates the toxicity of a vaccine), it is probably because this particular information resonates with her priors and values \u2013 which simply means that she endorses at least some aspects of the information, and not that she doesn\u2019t care about truth.\n\nWe have been repeatedly told that we have entered an era of post-truth, in which truth no longer matters and political debates are based on fake stories. But truth has not become an obsolete value. Even Trump and his supporters, who massively rely on misinformation, accuse their opponents and mass media of lying and of intentional false reporting to deceive the public. However, the accuracy of a piece of information is not always on the radar. We certainly want to appear as interesting as we can, and we don’t want to share things we know to be of poor quality. But, as Alberto points out, the quality of an idea or a piece of information doesn\u2019t always lie in its truth value: \u201cWe are not sensitive to an abstract notion of truth, but to various cues that points out to the importance of the context and which may be associated only on average with truthfulness\u201d (p. 184)\n\nSometimes the truth value of an information is what makes it valuable. Mainstream media, politics, scientific and educational institutions are expected<\/em> to relay true information in an objective way, and I think my friends on Facebook expect <\/em>me to do the same on my wall (they would probably tell me if I were to spread any fake news). An article from The Onion is funny (and relevant) even if it\u2019s not true, but when a politician falls for it, then the fact that it is fake makes it even funnier. Truth may be a necessary condition for the relevance of a piece of news but is never a sufficient condition. As Wilson & Sperber (2002) stressed it, verbal communication is governed not by expectations of truthfulness but by expectations of relevance.\n\nSometimes people just share information in order not to attract people\u2019s attention on the truth of particular facts, but rather to highlight the relevance of the ideas these facts may serve to illustrate. In this case, their intention is to point to an idea or an attitude and make it more manifest through this illustration. Most people who share misinformation on the internet don\u2019t do it with the intention of fooling others, nor do they \u201cforget\u201d to be careful \u2013 although it can obviously happen that misinformation passes through the net of our epistemic vigilance. False information can highlight a particular feature of the world, which can be informative in itself: Si non \u00e8 vero \u00e8 ben trovato! <\/em>[Even if it is not true, it is well thought up] as they say in Italy.\n\nIn a recent study, Pennycook and colleagues suggested that individuals spread false news about Covid-19 because they failed to think sufficiently about whether or not the content was accurate when deciding what to share. Participants were indeed worse at discerning true from false content when deciding what they would share on social media as compared to when they were asked directly about accuracy. This is an interesting result, but an alternative explanation is that, while people are generally able to make the difference between true and false information, they don\u2019t necessarily share and interpret information on social media with an assumption of accuracy. It\u2019s not that we don\u2019t care about truth, but we also use the internet to exchange views, opinions and attitudes. When caught spreading misinformation, we may feel embarrassed because we care of our reputation. But more often than not, accuracy was not really the point.\n\nThe Internet has promoted a new culture of communication, in which the attitude of, say, derision relative to the content that is shared can matter more than the content itself, even if that content is a recycled meme, a bad joke or just old news. For instance, a clever status accompanying the sharing of a fake news can be of no informational value, and yet be seen as relevant and witty. Because content can be produced and shared at a minimal cost \u2013 it is possible to share an article without reading it \u2013 sharing a content can be interpreted in multiple ways (to endorse its point of view, to point to its existence, or as a joke, an hyperbole, and so on). As a consequence, content shared on social media often doesn\u2019t come with a strong presumption of truthfulness, but rather with the expectation of conveying a relevant attitude on some issue.\n\nThe relevance and attractiveness of a piece information depends not only on its content, but also on the values with which it is associated. When information is shared on social media, higher-level ideas such as political opinions can be implicitly conveyed as well. For example, the news reporting evidence of the toxicity of a vaccine is closely associated with the idea that the interests of \u201cBig Pharma\u201d often go against the well-being of people. I wonder whether social media actually contribute to reinforcing the link between social and political values on the one hand and, on the other, specific stances on concrete issues, just because they encourage this kind of association. Dissociating one\u2019s opinion regarding a scientific issue from the political set of ideas it is generally associated with is not an easy task, and social media might make it even more difficult.\n\nWe are obviously able to switch to a more local accuracy mode. In real life, we don\u2019t fast-check everything \u2013 it would be very impolite to begin with \u2013 but we do so when it is relevant to us. We can focus our attention on the accuracy of some information (whether it is the efficacity of a treatment against Covid-19 or the spelling of a given word) when needed to improve our model of the world so as to make it both practically and socially functional \u2013 or when we want to prove that we are right, which is always a nice feeling.\n\nThe logical conclusion of Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age <\/em>is that we should not worry too much about online misinformation. I\u2019m happy with this positive conclusion, but it makes me even more curious on how humans readily switch from being wary learners and hard to convince, to being overly generous to ideas that fit with values they are committed to uphold.\n\n
\n\nReferences<\/strong>\n\n\n\n\n\nWilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2002). Truthfulness and relevance.\u00a0Mind<\/em>,\u00a0111<\/em>(443), 583-632.\n\n\n\n\n\nMercier, H. (2020). Not born yesterday. In\u00a0Not Born Yesterday<\/em>. Princeton University Press.\n\n\n\n\n\nPennycook, G., McPhetres, J., Zhang, Y., Lu, J. G., & Rand, D. G. (2020). Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy-nudge intervention.\u00a0Psychological science<\/em>,\u00a031<\/em>(7), 770-780.\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thank you, Alberto, for writing this book! In addition to being a captivating reading, it shed light on some thoughts I had on how people share information on social media, and what truth has to do with it. I outline these thoughts, hoping that they can be refined in the general discussion. One of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[298],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTruth is not always the point - International Cognition and Culture Institute<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/webinars\/cultural-evolution-in-the-digital-age\/truth-is-not-always-the-point\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Truth is not always the point - International Cognition and Culture Institute\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Thank you, Alberto, for writing this book! In addition to being a captivating reading, it shed light on some thoughts I had on how people share information on social media, and what truth has to do with it. 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