Truth Decay in the Coronavirus Moment: Q&A with Jennifer Kavanagh

And then you have the media. There are many actors in the media who are working really hard to get the facts out there. But the fact that the media is at its heart a business trying to make money, means outlets may keep fueling that fire of fear. The 24-hour-a-day coverage, the constant panicked headlines? That’s not good for anyone. The online sources are no better: social media, Twitter, Facebook. These places can fill people with fear, false information, and confusion.

People always ask what ended Truth Decay in previous periods. Michael Rich and I did some historical comparisons. The answer seems to be some kind of serious incident: a catastrophe, the Great Depression, a war, a moment when people realized the consequences of making decisions based on what they want to be true or what they hope will be true and ignoring the actual evidence. Is COVID-19 enough to cause that snapback? I certainly hope so. But it’s just something that we have to watch for now.

Hiday: Or could the panic make distrust, and therefore Truth Decay, worse?
Kavanagh: A period of economic and social dislocation is going to hurt trust in the near term, but there’s an opportunity to build trust in the long run if it’s handled properly. One of the reasons the Great Depression was so long and so severe is that in the early period, policymakers ignored the data they had and made decisions based on other things. That just made it worse and undermined trust even more. Learning from that example, the next couple of weeks are critical in terms of the decisions our policymakers make to try to rebuild public confidence.

They have to show they have the situation under control, but also that they use data to send a consistent message from all the players who are providing us information. That isn’t what’s happening right now.

Bottom line: Individuals have to realize that facts and data matter, that there are experts who have information, and that those experts should be looked to as sources of information about health. There has to be the change at the policy level as well as the community level. Evidence and facts should drive all of our decisions every day. If we don’t make our decisions that way, we can end up with serious and unwanted consequences.

Hiday: What’s your own research agenda at the moment?
Kavanagh: I’m really interested in tracking public opinion. We have the perfect opportunity here to track how events like this change people’s attitudes about the government, about the media, about their community. How it affects their attitudes towards each other, how it affects their attitudes towards things like vaccines. Does it drive people away from them? Does it convince them that they do matter?

I’m interested in the effect on partisanship. Does this event bring people together, as we’ve seen in past national crises? Or will the health effects or economic impacts worsen the economic and social polarization that we already have in this country?

More generally, I’m interested in the effect at the global level in terms of things like trade conflict and border and travel restrictions. We saw some movement towards these restrictions even before the virus, driven by concerns over immigration and refugees. And so my question is: How do those things interact when this is over? Do those restrictions go away, or is this used as a reason to keep those restrictions and those border controls in place?

This interview is published courtesy of RAND.