Truth decayTruth Decay in the Coronavirus Moment: Q&A with Jennifer Kavanagh
The COVID-19 crisis “is the type of environment in which false and misleading information thrives and spreads quickly. People are vulnerable. People are afraid. People don’t know what to believe. Trust in basically every organization or position that we would turn to is pretty low. There’s higher trust in the medical community than in, say, media or government, but it’s still not all that high. The combination of low trust and high volume of information coming from people who are not experts—but purport to be experts—creates the perfect storm for the average person,” says Jennifer Kavanagh, author of Truth Decay.
There is so much information and misinformation out there about the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. Jennifer Kavanagh, who wrote the RAND book Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (co-authored with Michael D. Rich) about the diminishing role that facts play in making important public policy decisions, calls the current situation a worst-case scenario.
She spoke with RAND’s media relations director, Jeffrey Hiday. Following is an edited version of their conversation.
Jeffrey Hiday: To what extent is Truth Decay at work here during the coronavirus pandemic?
Jennifer Kavanagh: This is exactly the worst-case scenario that I imagined when I was writing the book.
This is the type of environment in which false and misleading information thrives and spreads quickly. People are vulnerable. People are afraid. People don’t know what to believe. Trust in basically every organization or position that we would turn to is pretty low. There’s higher trust in the medical community than in, say, media or government, but it’s still not all that high.
The combination of low trust and high volume of information coming from people who are not experts—but purport to be experts—creates the perfect storm for the average person. I am a well-informed person who knows where to go for good information, but even I am struggling to figure out what’s true and what’s not. So you can imagine how, how hard it would be for the average person who hasn’t spent the past three years studying disinformation.
Hiday: Today people were sending around this message that the president is about to invoke the Stafford Act and that this is going to lead to a two-week national quarantine. It was also rapidly debunked—but is this an example of what you’re talking about?
Kavanagh: Exactly. There are people who are trying to do their jobs by providing what they think is right and just messing up. But there are other actors intentionally contributing to the problem. We also have foreign actors who are actively spreading false information about the source of the virus—for example, saying it is a bioweapon developed by the U.S. military.
Plus we have an internal partisan conflict over which sources are accurate and disagreements about the level of severity and how concerned we should be.
