MISINFORMATIONWhy Did So Many Buy COVID Misinformation? It Works Like Magic.
Misinformation and disinformation about COVID and government-led health measures to combat the pandemic hampered efforts to form a unified national response to the disease. Public health officials, who struggled to convince doubters and skeptics, are still working through how and why it happened. Harvard Law panelists say both misinformation and magic exploit how brains process information.
Misinformation and disinformation about COVID and government-led health measures to combat the pandemic hampered efforts to form a unified national response to the disease. Public health officials, who struggled to convince doubters and skeptics, are still working through how and why it happened.
Panelists at a talk hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School last Friday examined surprising parallels between magic and misinformation, a discussion that offered insights into some of the cognitive forces at play.
Magic, misinformation, and disinformation are effective, the experts said, because they take advantage of how the brain processes information. Misinformation, sharing inaccurate information unintentionally, and disinformation, spreading falsehoods to mislead, each contain factual or logical holes that our brains rush to fill much the way it does when we watch magic tricks, said Jeanette Andrews, a magician and artist alum of the MetaLAB (at) Harvard.
“We’re a lot of times either skimming information and trying to fill in those mental gaps, whether consciously or unconsciously. As a species, we are always craving certainty, so we’re always on the hunt to be able to complete a picture, to complete information,” she said.
Creating conceptual gaps typically involves either giving audiences incomplete information or too much of it all at once, what some disinformation purveyors call “flooding the zone.”
“Magic performances are very carefully constructed to either overwhelm the viewer with too much information, so you have to pick out what seems like only the most important pieces of information, or maybe not quite enough information, so then you are making mental leaps based on the perceptual information that you have to create a complete experience,” said Andrews, as she performed a magic trick in which a piece of string cut in four places appears to reattach itself.
The audience knows intellectually that a solid piece of string cannot put itself back together after being cut into pieces, and yet, the brain is telling them that is what they have witnessed.
“That’s where a lot of times our cognitive biases jump in, to start to fill in those gaps,” she added. “So, if you see something, or even part of something, that is presented to you to be true, you’re more likely to continue on in that frame of belief.”
