HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

Disinformation; misinformation, what is the science of how false beliefs spread?

This is the critical understanding that my guests today argue is required to correct falsehoods and to ensure that they don't hijack and certainly don't monopolize the public interest.

University of California, Irvine professors, Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall have authored the new Yale University Press volume The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread.

They argue that throughout history, social factors specifically who you know, your network of friends and family most determined whether false beliefs spread and whether they can be debunked.

The authors conclude, The worry that we can never gain complete certainty about matters of fact is irrelevant.

And as the New York Times reviewed, O'Connor and Weatherall show how industrial interests have repeatedly exploited any whiff of uncertainty to argue against government regulation.

Welcome to you both.

WEATHERALL: Thank you.

O'CONNOR: Thanks so much for having us.

HEFFNER: Where are we drawing the line now when it comes to this idea of false beliefs, there are those who would argue that you are entitled to your own beliefs because they equate beliefs with opinion.

How Cailin are you attacking that problem from the outset of this research to understand the difference between belief and opinion and when misinformed or disinformed opinion leads to these falsehoods?

O'CONNOR: Well, so when we're talking about belief in the book, we're not talking about belief, for example, about something like religion.

We're talking about actual matters of fact.

So as we point out, these kinds of beliefs, there's evidence that tells you what you ought to believe.

So it's, it's just different from opinion.

There are reasons to have certain beliefs and not have other beliefs.

HEFFNER: At it's core are we talking about a belief system?

Are we talking about how people arrive at those ideas?

WEATHERALL: Well, you know, I think the main thing that we're talking about are just, you know, the beliefs that we have about what medications are going to work, what policies are going to be successful, you know, things like whether smoking is harmful to you.

Now, often, there is a system of beliefs that goes along with these sorts of things.

And it's true that one way in which people often form their beliefs or change their beliefs has to do with ideology, background, views that they have, maybe religious belief, maybe political beliefs, beliefs about who to trust for instance.

HEFFNER: So let's go to the core of your thesis, the science of misinformation, of how folks become misinformed.

Your contention is what?

O'CONNOR: So after the 2016 election, what prompted us to write this book is we saw a lot of analyses of why we're having this crisis of false belief in the US.

These analyses tended to focus at least at that point in time on ways in which humans are not good at reasoning about evidence.

So for example, the fact that people tend to pay attention to evidence that supports the belief they already hold and ignore evidence that doesn't or that people are bad at probabilities and we think that understanding that is really important to understanding false belief.

But our contention in the book is that there's something that's just as important and probably even more important, which is understanding people's social ties and the ways we get our beliefs from other people.

So I mean if you think about the things you believe, it's probably the case that 99 percent of them you just got directly from other people in your social network.

That's where we all get our beliefs, which is wonderful.

That's an extremely powerful thing for people to be able to do.

I mean we wouldn't have culture or technology, we wouldn't have been able to go to the moon or anything like that if we didn't have the social spread of beliefs.

But whenever you open up the door to getting true beliefs from other people, you also open up the door to getting false beliefs too.

And we think understanding that is key to understanding why people hold false beliefs, why we're having this crisis in false belief and how to intervene on it.

HEFFNER: Folks will say young people, especially that their family and their friends were central to the formation of their belief system or what party or political allegiance they may have.

But what's different now, because folks had been saying that for decades and now you have a party that's led by someone who is peddling lies often.

So what's the difference?

WEATHERALL: Well, you know, so, well, a few things.

One is that I think if you look at the history of American politics, lies and misinformation, propaganda have played a major role for our entire history.

What's changed is the media by which the misinformation is spread and in some ways the effectiveness of the methods people have gotten very good at producing misinformation and influencing people's beliefs.

Part of the reason for this as well, it has always been the case.

We would contend that social factors are crucial to how we form beliefs, just as you say.

The structure of our social networks has changed in the last 10 years, really, because of the rise of social media and the Internet.

We interact with different people.

We interact in different ways.

It's increasingly the case that we can curate our social networks, you know, we can choose to only interact with these people and not these people.

We can, it's much harder to block someone at Thanksgiving as much as we might like to if it is on Twitter.

And so I think that what, what happens then is that in so far as it's the structure of your social network that's influencing what you believe and now you can control your social network in ways that are often responsive to what you believe and what the people who you're interacting with believe, you can end up with feedback loops that are self-reinforcing.

O'CONNOR: Well there, so there's two really important things to realize about the way new social media structures influence our beliefs.

One is this thing Jim was pulling out.

So now people can structure who they communicate with and interact with much more.

And then the other is that having all these social, types of social media means that people who want to influence the minds of the American public, have direct access to them in a way that was much harder to have before.

HEFFNER: Right.

So how is the science of that direct access, salient here, the science of understanding how people are being misinformed today, wherever they may come from, whatever state they're in, whatever party affiliation they may have.

And you say that understanding the science is important to fixing the problem.

O'CONNOR: Yeah.

So here's one really important thing that I think we pull out in the book.

We tend to have a kind of naive view, I think, about, for example, how industry influences science and scientific beliefs.

So if you asked how does industry influence science, people might say sometimes they pay a scientist and then that scientist starts to get the right results for industry, right?

What we've shown through different case studies is that the influence tends to be much more subtle, insidious and clever whether it's coming from industry or whether it's coming from Russia, it's important to understand how subtle and specialized the techniques that influencers use can be, in order to protect ourselves from it.

And in particular, we think once you understand the subtlety, it makes you think that something like putting some algorithms to protect ourselves in play or having a code of ethics for scientists won't be enough, that instead we're going to need to have people whose job it is to fight misinformation, for example, on the Internet.

HEFFNER: Right, or ensure that these companies take more editorial control, which they have attempted to now YouTube indicating that it is not going to recommend in its algorithms conspiracy videos.

But at the same time they still find a host there, just as Jeff Bezos on Amazon, his servers' host websites that are engaged in the same kind of fear mongering and sometimes conspiracy theories.

So, the leadership will have to be people who are hired to enforce those rules, but those companies are not still taking ownership of their negative impact in those feedback loops.

WEATHERALL: Look, I think that there you're getting at something which is a very deep problem culturally and politically, which is that we value freedom of speech and that often involves the, you know, that sense that we should be able to say whatever we want and look if Facebook is telling some people no, you can't post your memes, you can't post your articles, that feels like it's repressive in some way that I think many of us react negatively to.

On the other hand, we have to recognize that number one there's a need for standards of a certain sort, but also that we're being used to further other people's political and economic goals.

And so, one of the things that we try to do in the book and that we, we hope that the book can do is make people a little bit more aware and sophisticated of how the ways in which they are executing what they feel is their free speech.

It's not really expressing their ideas so much as becoming a kind of tool in a machine that's designed to influence other people's beliefs, right?

I think we often see increasingly things that on reflection are intentional misinformation propaganda, informs that is designed to go viral, designed to be spread and you know, interact with, for instance, algorithms on, you know, Facebook or YouTube, developed in order to spread more widely.

O'CONNOR: What we also see is that once some of these companies develop algorithms to protect themselves, the misinformation.

So for example, the Internet Research Agency, the Russian agency who are mostly responsible for misinformation on the Internet, they adapt and they get better at misinformation.

So one thing people have to realize is that we have to keep adapting our responses to them too if we want to protect ourselves from misinformation and disinformation.

HEFFNER: How do you think that the science can be employed?

Or at least kind of counteracting the science of misinformation with a culture of information and integrity?

What are the vehicles to achieving that from your unique vantage point as people who study logic and the intersection of logic and our democracy.

O'CONNOR: Well, one thing I think is what I've sort of been hinting at is that social media sites, but also our government need to create groups of people who, their responsibility is to keep fighting misinformation and disinformation as it adapts in whatever new forms it's taking, right, so to use algorithms, for example, to protect social media, but then once a Russian agents have adapted to those algorithms figure out what is another way to stop fake news, whatever tricky misinformation is being used.

So that's one thing.

We've also talked in the book some about the structure of our democracy.

So there's an idea going back pretty far in US history that good ideas win out.

There's a marketplace of ideas.

And so if you have a lot of ideas out there, the best ones through public debate, through looking at scientific evidence, will kind of rise to the top and everyone will adopt those.

As we point out in the book, this doesn't always happen, especially when you have people trying to influence public belief or sometimes it takes a really long time for this to happen.

So for example, in the case of the dangers of tobacco, Big Tobacco was able to delay regulation on cigarettes for decades through misinformation techniques.

If the marketplace of ideas doesn't work, we have a problem because in our democracy we vote as if we're voting about what's true sometimes.

So we get to vote about whether we're going to treat climate change like it's really happening.

Of course, if we vote for people who don't believe in climate change and don't act on it, that doesn't actually change the truth and it doesn't change whether we're going to have to face the consequences of climate change.

One thing we point out is that there might be different ways to structure our democracy so that people get to vote on things like, what are our values?

What do we want?

Do we want a clean, safe environment?

Do we want a free market?

And then once people have spoken about what they value, we use experts to tell us what is the best evidence.

Tell us about the world and how does that help us craft the best policies to implement our values.

WEATHERALL: You know we talk about a lot of possible solutions, many of which are addressing specific and local parts of the problem.

So we look at, we approached the whole thing from the point of view of the dynamics of false belief where false beliefs come from, how they spread, and how they end up being manipulated or created.

And so for instance, one thing that we discuss in the book is how good journalistic practice, standard journalistic practice often mimics the practices of propaganda, so people who are explicitly trying to influence beliefs.

Here's an example.

So one standard and successful method that propagandists use is by a cherry picking evidence, right?

So you, you don't try to buy scientists.

You don't try to get scientists to commit fraud.

What you do is you take real scientific results.

You just take the small handful of them that seem to go your way and broadcast that.

HEFFNER: Great example of that would be Amy Klobuchar making her announcement for president in Minnesota during a snow storm and the President the next day saying, using that reframe of climate instead of climate change, global warming.

Right.

And the idea that if it's not warming, then this thing, this conc O'CONNOR: Right.

And that one instance of a snowstorm should be evidence that there isn't global warming or more traditionally people have found the very few climate scientists who will say, oh, global warming might not be real and then widely publicize their work.

HEFFNER: But what do you do when the President of the United States is doing that every day on Twitter?

He's taking the one often seeds of truth to try to conveniently explain something that is not, I mean, that was a lot of his 2016 campaign.

And I'm wondering, you know, it's not like there's the Petri dish, it's like, you know, live and grown and metastasizing.

So what is the solution to that when folks do try to cherry pick, Jim, and take those examples and blow them up and they're factually wrong when they're blown up?

WEATHERALL: Right, so, you know, I'm not sure that we have a solution when the President's doing this, O'CONNOR: Voting, WEATHERALL: Except voting.

But I think that when companies are doing this, which often, you know, often happens with medical products or O'CONNOR:Tobacco industry, oil and coal, WEATHERALL: That there for the same reason that we have a regulatory structure for false advertising, I think that we need to have a regulatory structure that addresses the ways in which corporations can present misleading samples of evidence, present evidence in ways that suggest beliefs that are not in fact supported by the full body of evidence.

HEFFNER: Those companies or those individuals will use one example, and not the litany of other examples, to substantiate an argument that's false or fallacious, so what do you do socially in situations where someone wants to insist that their belief is not false, that this is an opinion that they're entitled to their own opinion and that single fact is going to dictate how they process it and then how they share their own story that WEATHERALL: Yeah, O'CONNOR: I mean rehabilitating the strongly held beliefs of other people who we interact with socially is an extremely difficult thing.

So there's quite a lot of evidence showing that just presenting more evidence often doesn't work.

So maybe you've encountered, you know, a family member who is an anti-vaxxer, doesn't believe that vaccines work or believes vaccines are dangerous rather, or as a climate denialist just giving them more evidence.

It often doesn't convince people.

Sometimes it even causes what's called a backfire effect where people will kind of entrench.

One thing we point out in the book is that influencers often take advantage of our social ties or social communication to try to spread false beliefs.

If we want to think about spreading true beliefs, we might have to do the same thing.

So, for example, one way people decide how to trust evidence or belief being shared by other people is to look at what are, what do I share with them?

Do I share identity with them?

Are we interested in the same activities?

And in particular, do we share beliefs?

So we point out that we might be able to sort of rehabilitate people, by first emphasizing, you know, with someone.

What things do you share?

Grounding, social trust and then using that to try to slowly convince them to take on better evidence.

HEFFNER: Jim, you were going to chime in here too.

WEATHERALL: Well, I just wanted to emphasize that insofar as the way that people come to have false beliefs, this is the same point the Cailin made really, insofar as people come to have false beliefs as a result of social factors, you should expect that they're going to come to have true beliefs as a result of social factors.

And so what you need to do is think about how to, you know, make sure that information is being shared in a reliable way as well as misinformation and, think about the ways in which, as Cailin said, particular people are going to be more influential in particular groups.

So people who seem like they're trustworthy from the point of view of that group, they share some beliefs, they're not somehow ideologically opposed to the groups.

HEFFNER: My concern about the word belief is that the verb to believe, right versus to know and knowledge and misinforming people comes down to knowledge, facts and figures.

People may not even take offense to the idea that their belief is false bef and the same thing as their opinion.

How do you differentiate that - the idea of believing something versus knowing something?

O'CONNOR: Well, as we pointed out in the book, sometimes there is a problem with thinking about knowledge because knowledge usually equates with something like absolute certainty.

If you know something, then you know it, you're certain about it, right?

One thing the history of philosophy tells us, I mean, we're both philosophers, is that on some level we don't really, really know anything.

So I know that we're getting philosophical.

So if take the belief that the sun is going to rise tomorrow, I mean, the sun has always risen before.

We have really good reasons to think the sun is going to rise tomorrow.

It's possible that the sun could explode, right?

So we're not absolutely certain that the sun's going to rise tomorrow, but influencers take advantage of things like this.

So you've maybe heard lines like evolution is just a theory or there's some possibility climate change isn't caused by human action.

Well, there is some possibility and it's possible the sun won't rise tomorrow.

So sometimes influencers take advantage of knowledge by saying we don't have full absolute, complete certain knowledge; therefore it's too soon to act on something.

It's too soon to develop policies to regulate and protect ourselves.

The reason we like to talk about belief is when you're talking about belief, you can respond, who cares if we're not absolutely certain, we have enough evidence to have a very strong belief that climate change is real and it's caused by people and we need to act to protect ourselves.

HEFFNER: Right.

I just wonder if it's, if it's a kind of concession that we're not willing to go the distance with people.

I was suggesting really that we ought to be informing people so that they know and they don't believe so that they know with more or less certainty or not more or less, with certainty, right.

And when it comes to misinformation, is, is knowing and guaranteeing that people can know the right answer more important today than believing?

WEATHERALL: Well, so, HEFFNER: It's still philosophical.

Right?

WEATHERALL: Right.

I think that, so I think Cailin has put her finger on one issue having to do with the relationship between knowledge and certainty.

But I also think that the expectation of certainty has created big problems.

So, for instance, you often get the impression when you're reading, you know, newspaper articles about nutrition science that we have no idea what's good for us, you know, what's healthy, right?

Sugar is terrible, sugar is great and it's corn syrup that's bad and fat is terrible.

No, you have to eat more fat.

Don't eat butter, don't you know, don't eat margarine, whatever.

This is fact that arises for two reasons.

One, a tendency to write about single studies where single studies can show anything.

It's the whole body of scientific literature that we need to be studying.

But also it creates problems because it looks as if scientists don't know what they're doing, right?

It looks as if, you know, I read an article; this is what the best science says, that should mean that I know something that I get to be certain now.

And then two weeks later I read another article that says exactly the opposite thing.

HEFFNER: Weigh in for a moment on George Lakeoff's idea over at Berkeley, not where you work, nearby, of a Truth Sandwich that in order to insist on our media and our politicians deliver us information and not misinformation that we ought to repeat the truth, start with the truth, then correct the misinformation and then, reassert the truth again.

We found during the 2016 cycle, the ledes to newspaper articles, the verified Twitter handles and basically all the content that would sweep the public was starting with the misinformation, then attempting to correct it, if even then, and then going back to the innuendo instead of leading with the truth.

Just can you guys briefly weigh in on that?

Is that the best strategy?

O'CONNOR: Well, I certainly think that for example, journalists should not publish articles with headlines like Trump says, then Blah de yadda yadda some false thing, right?

As you point out, that's extremely like misinforming people read that and they just see what he said and it doesn't say, here's the truth right, in the first thing.

I mean another thing that I think would be a great thing to have would be just a fact checking in real time.

For example, during a political talks or debates, just coming out and saying, that's a lie.

Here's what the actual truth is.

HEFFNER: Thank you so much for joining me today.

O'CONNOR: Oh, thanks for having us.

WEATHERALL: Thanks, Alex.

HEFFNER: And thanks to you in the audiene.

I hope you join us again next time for a thoughtful excursion into the world of ideas.

Until then, keep an open mind.

Please visit The Open Mind website at Thirteen.org/OpenMind to view this program online or to access over 1,500 other interviews and do check us out on Twitter and Facebook @OpenMindTV for updates on future programming.