Why do people always believe in news that is so fake that it is ridiculous?

Eye-catching fake news spreads rapidly by taking advantage of people’s instinct to share. Cognitive biases lead readers to believe in positions rather than facts. Sometimes, people only insist on the gesture of “sticking to principles” rather than the “principles” themselves.

Image | Public domain

Author | Tang Yicheng, China Science Popularization Mental Health Promotion Center Editor | Long Hao Gao Peiwen

From the past to the present, the issue of "fake news" has always attracted much attention. From the extensive media coverage of the issue to the government's establishment of a special investigation committee, it has repeatedly demonstrated its determination to eliminate fake news. But in fact, fake news has been repeatedly banned.
For example, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 lost contact in 2014, all kinds of media information were flying around, and a variety of conspiracy theories made people confused; during the new coronavirus epidemic, absurd false news such as "someone used 5G base stations to spread the virus" and "the new coronavirus is man-made" were also popular, causing collective confusion and panic.

Fake news spreads very quickly once it is released. But why can fake news with so many mistakes spread so quickly? Why do people always like to read fake news? This has to start with the laws of human psychology. Fake news in the true sense refers to "false, sensational information spread in the form of news reports", and its content is often inflammatory. It spreads virally through people's sharing behavior, causing great social harm. In fact, sharing news is a human instinct. In an information society, people connect with others and gain a sense of identity by exchanging valuable information. Without sharing, social networks do not exist, because we form a whole through the continuous exchange of information.

For some people, sharing is an altruistic behavior. Forwarding news to people in need will make them feel a sense of dedication and a feeling that "I belong to a certain group." Some people are "showy sharers" who use news as social currency to establish an impression that they are well-informed.

Sharing news is human nature | unsplash
Fake news often spreads itself by taking advantage of the human instinct to share, partly because the content of fake news is eye-catching, and partly because certain cognitive biases make it difficult for us to distinguish the authenticity of news. Can't stop: The more details, the more "believable" the fake news is The conjunction fallacy makes us easily deceived by fake news. The conjunction fallacy states that if the false story is well-written and full of details, it is easier for us to believe the fake news. The more details a piece of news contains, the more plausible it feels, even though in fact the possibility of the event becomes less, not more.

For example, imagine a fictional woman named "Linda". Linda is 31 years old, single, straightforward, smart, and majored in philosophy. When she was a student, she paid special attention to gender discrimination and social justice issues and actively participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which of the following two options is more likely to be an accurate description? 1. Linda is a bank teller. 2. Linda is a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement.
The second one seems more believable because its content is consistent with the background introduction, making the whole story seem more coherent and substantial. However, in fact, the first one is more likely to happen. The reason is simple: the situation of the first one includes the situation of the second one.

By extension, for any statements A, B, and C, the probability that A is true is always greater than the probability that A, B, and C are all true, because if A, B, and C are all true, A must be true, but not vice versa.
When two things can happen individually or in combination, the probability of the two things happening together cannot be higher than the probability of any one thing happening alone. This simple truth is understood by everyone, but when watching the news, people always instinctively think that things with more details have a higher probability of happening.
In fact, the more specific something is, the less likely it is to happen. On the Internet, false stories are carefully crafted and full of details. Because of the rich details, it is easy for us to believe that such false news is true.

The more details, the more "credible" the news, but the less likely it is to happen | unsplash
Confirmation bias: stance sometimes overshadows facts. Stance can also affect our judgment of news. Slate magazine conducted an experiment in which it showed readers photos of real events and five randomly selected fake photos. The results showed that on average, each fake photo implanted false memories in at least 15% of people. Overall, nearly half of the participants believed that the events depicted in the fake photos did happen. Steven Frenda, a psychologist in Los Angeles, California, found through analysis of experimental data that people are more willing to believe fake photos that are consistent with their political stance or worldview, that is, fake news that is consistent with your stance is more likely to be believed.

The reason for this phenomenon is "confirmation bias", which means that we will look for and interpret information in a way that supports our own views. In this case, we may block certain information and only believe information that supports our own views, even if this information is false. A few days ago, there was news that Trump colluded with Russia to manipulate the US election. There are many theories, but there is no solid evidence. Here is the manifestation of "confirmation bias":
You will find that every time there is new "revelations" about Trump's collusion with Russia in the media, Trump's supporters and opponents will use these revelations as evidence to support their own views!
People who oppose Trump say that this revelation proves Trump’s collusion with Russia; people who support Trump say there is no actual evidence at all. The fact that you use something without any evidence to talk about Trump just proves that Trump is innocent!

Trump and Putin "intimate meeting" | Kremlin.ru In fact, we have always seen the world through tinted glasses, and everyone sees the world distorted. Some studies have further pointed out that when people are affected by confirmation bias and believe in fake news, they may even distort their own memories. In other words, people often turn their lies into part of their memories.
In 2018, a study by Brandeis University in the United States found that it only takes 45 minutes for people to believe a lie they made up. The study involved 42 participants, half of whom were elderly (60-92 years old) and the other half were millennials (18-24 years old). Everyone was given a form with 102 questions about what they did the day before.

The researchers randomly selected half of the questions and asked the subjects to lie. 45 minutes later, the respondents answered the same questionnaire. This time, the researchers asked them to answer all questions truthfully, but the results showed that "some lies change memory, creating new memories for things that did not actually happen." Of course, compared with young people, the elderly are more easily misled by false information.
It seems that not only are we easily misled by fake news on the Internet and trigger false memories, but we also provide ourselves with wrong information. In other words, lying can also tamper with people's memories.
Choice blindness: Actually...position is also floating in the air. As mentioned earlier, people are more willing to believe fake news that proves their own position. "The butt determines the head" is a human nature! However, the following two experiments will tell you that even the position is unreliable! In 2005, several Swedish researchers accidentally discovered an interesting psychological effect called "choice blindness", which means that people often cannot remember their own choices.

In the experiment, the researchers showed the subjects two photos and asked them to choose which photo was better looking and more attractive. After the subjects made their choice, the researchers put the two photos away and fiddled with them like shuffling cards. Then they took out one of the photos and put it in front of the subjects and asked, "Can you explain to me why you think this person is more attractive?"
The key to this experiment is that the photo the researcher later took out was not the one the subject had originally chosen, but the one he had rejected and failed to choose. But the result of the experiment was that most of the subjects did not notice it.

The "selection blindness" effect has been repeatedly verified several times. For example, a 2013 study asked subjects to choose several funds for investment, and then immediately displayed these funds on the screen, saying that these are your choices and can you explain why you chose them? More than 60% of the subjects did not notice that a fund on the screen had been changed.
The most interesting feature of the "choice blindness" phenomenon is that people not only forget their own choices, but they can also talk about the replaced choice and explain why they chose it - as if it was really their choice.

Choosing blindness allows people to ignore their own position and defend their own "choices". | pixabay

The phenomenon of "selective blindness" reminds us that when faced with some opinions on public affairs, if they are not related to our own interests, our positions are actually wavering, and in many cases, we don't even remember our positions. People only insist on the posture of "sticking to principles" rather than the content of the "principles" themselves. When faced with a flood of news and information, what people care about most is often not the truth or falsity of the news, or even whether the news conforms to their positions, but whether they can win the debate. False news and fickle positions have made the Internet a disaster area for cognitive biases. Who is forwarding fake news? In the era of "everyone can speak up", the Internet has become a hotbed for fake news. On the one hand, the Internet lacks "gatekeepers" and information is not reviewed by editors, resulting in a large amount of information mixed together, making it difficult to distinguish between true and false; on the other hand, the rise of self-media has made news production easier and the speed of news dissemination has soared, which has led to the proliferation of fake news.

So who are the people who are forwarding fake news, and what do these people have in common? Before and after the 2016 US election, researchers from New York University and Princeton University tracked 1,300 people and found that age may be the best indicator for judging people who share fake news. Among them, 11% of users over 65 shared fake news links, while only 3% of users aged 18 to 29 shared them. In terms of the number of fake news shared, people over 65 are nearly 7 times that of people aged 18 to 29.

It can be seen that the elderly are the main force in spreading fake news. This is partly because the elderly lack the digital media literacy necessary to judge the authenticity of online news. More importantly, from the perspective of cognitive and social psychology, aging has a negative impact on cognition and memory.
The theory is that as we age, our memories deteriorate, making it harder for older people to resist the "illusory truth effect," which is when they are repeatedly exposed to a certain type of information and are more willing to believe it is correct. When assessing the truth, they are more willing to judge based on their familiarity rather than rational analysis. Therefore, the more complex the information environment and the more prevalent the misinformation, the more severe this effect will be.

The Internet has become a hotbed of fake news, and the elderly are the hardest hit | Pixabay How to defend against fake news To resist the influence of fake news, learning to think about the rationality of numbers is the first step.
Many news stories use numbers to prove their point. For example, one news story mentioned that the number of people who smoke marijuana in California has doubled every year for 35 years. The numbers here are problematic. Assuming that 35 years ago, there was only one person who smoked marijuana in California, and this number doubled every year, it would exceed 17 billion in 35 years. A simple calculation can verify the reliability of the data.
At the same time, we need to be wary of the opinions of experts. Experts are generally right, but they can make mistakes. The bad thing is that it is easy to mistakenly assume that experts are always right, just because they are experts, they are respected and knowledgeable. This is especially true when trying new things in an existing field, people tend to think that people who know more seem to speak more persuasively. For example, physicist Gordon Shaw once proposed that listening to Mozart's music for 20 minutes a day can temporarily increase IQ. Later, this view was questioned because the physicist was not an authority on the study of the human mind. Moreover, in his experiment, one group listened to Mozart and the control group did nothing. The arrangement of the control group in the experiment was not rigorous, because boredom and stagnation can also cause IQ reactions to temporarily drop. So, experts can make mistakes.

Finally, it is important to emphasize the "confirmation bias" mentioned repeatedly above. "Confirmation bias" will make people pick data and information that are beneficial to them. For example, you believe that taking too much vitamin D will cause physical discomfort, so when evidence supporting this conclusion appears, you will agree without hesitation, ignoring whether the information itself is true. Therefore, when you get a point of view, you should examine the information on both sides of this point of view at the same time to avoid drawing biased conclusions. Similar to "confirmation bias" is a cognitive bias called "motivated reasoning", which means that when we are strongly motivated to draw a specific conclusion, the emotional arousal we experience will interfere with our reasoning method, causing us to lose our judgment of the news.
For example, suppose you are extremely disgusted with a certain American politician. When you see negative news about this politician, you will believe it without thinking, without considering the authenticity of the news.
Previously, there was an AI that could write fake news, called Grover, which could write some fantastic fake news on any topic, such as the bizarre article "Why Trump does 100 push-ups a day" written around the controversial figure Trump. It looks quite like that:

This ridiculous news topic, because of AI's understanding of Trump's personality and speech, may really deceive many people - especially those who have a negative impression of Trump.

Of course this is just a joke, but when you think that even AI can write fake news by itself, next time you forward a piece of news, will you think about it for 1 to 2 seconds longer?

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