Truth decayConfused about who to believe when information clashes? Our research may help
“Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” Donald Trump, the president of the United States, once said at a rally. There is no doubt that we have entered a new age of bewilderment in which it is harder than ever before to decide where the truth lies. The rise of social media has generated a cacophony of contradictory information, mixed in with fake news on an industrial scale. Despite this, many people actually consider social media to be more credible and honest than mainstream media.
“Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” Donald Trump, the president of the United States, once said at a rally. There is no doubt that we have entered a new age of bewilderment in which it is harder than ever before to decide where the truth lies.
Before the explosion of social media, the world seemed an altogether simpler place, with information reaching us via a relatively small number of seemingly trustworthy sources. The rise of social media has generated a cacophony of contradictory information, mixed in with fake news on an industrial scale. Despite this, many people actually consider social media to be more credible and honest than mainstream media.
The social media revolution has also moved many personal relationships online. Just like we used to get our favorite news from a few known sources, we also used to turn to a few friends to ask for advice about difficult decisions. Today we often gather advice via Facebook posts or WhatsApp groups – something that can leave us with a large number of contradictory opinions. It is no wonder that we are struggling to make our minds up about what to think these days. But our new research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, may offer some guidance.
Our study is based on a subtle psychological mechanism called the “confidence heuristic” that can prod us in the right direction. A heuristic is a rough-and-ready rule of thumb for making a decision, and the confidence heuristic focuses on the confidence with which people express statements.
It is based on a mathematical proof from game theory showing that, if we all express statements with confidence proportional to how sure we are, and if we are swayed by others’ statements according to how confidently they are expressed, then we will end up believing the right answers. Put simply, if people are confident when they think they are right, and if their confidence makes them persuasive, then this may help us to identify what is true.
