Why is misinformation so powerful?

Transcript

Intro: This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging. From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.

Nick: Welcome to PsychTalks, the podcast where we dive into the fascinating research happening here at the University of Melbourne's School of Psychological Sciences. I'm Professor Nick Haslam, and I'm joined by my amazing co-host, Associate Professor Cassie Hayward.

Cassie: Hi, Nick. Great to be here. Today, we're tackling an incredibly important issue, the rise of misinformation and disinformation. Now, this podcast has previously looked at why we can fall victim to conspiracy theories and misinformation way back in season one.

But we wanted to zoom in on the developments in the research since then. We've seen how the spread and influence of misinformation and disinformation has only increased, posing real threats to democratic processes, public health, and social trust.

Nick: And joining us to unpack it all is Associate Professor Piers Howe, who leads research at the Information and Influence Lab.

Cassie: Piers, welcome to PsychTalks. Um, could you start by telling us a bit about your background, your current research, and I guess what drew you to study misinformation and disinformation?

Piers: Yes, indeed, and thank you for having me on PsychTalks. So by training, I am a cognitive scientist, so I am very interested in studying, um, information processing and how people make decisions. So naturally I got drawn to this topic.

But obviously, what's been going on in the news and um what has been going on elsewhere. For example, last year the World Economic Forum listed mis- and disinformation as the number one short term global threats, that kind of gets your attention. So there's been lots of reasons why I've been focusing on this more and more.

In my lab, the um Information and Influence Lab, we focus on creating interventions both to reduce the spread of false information primarily on social media, but also to try and mitigate the harmful effects of mis- and disinformation. So perhaps to reduce uh support for undemocratic um practises or um even partisan violence.

Nick: So Piers, you're using terms like misinformation and disinformation and you also hear about uh fake news, terms like that thrown around all the time. Can you break down what they mean and how they differ?

Piers: Yes, sure. So, um, misinformation is false information that is communicated without the intent to deceive, though perhaps by people who haven't bothered to check whether it's true or not. Conversely, disinformation is communicated with the specific intent to deceive and the person communicating it knows it's false or at least misleading.

Fake news is not, not a particularly scientific term, um, popularised by a certain person and it generally means something which is put in a news format but hasn't undergone the editorial standards of a mainstream newspaper. So the attempt is to try and give something which hasn't gone through the editorial process, the appearance that it has to give it credibility when it shouldn't receive as much credibility.

Nick: I thought it was just news you didn't agree with.

Piers: [Laughs] There has been an alternative definition put forward by a certain president, but, um, no, that's not its definition.

Cassie: With all of those with disinformation, misinformation, and fake news, one impact that's been talked about is the impact they can have on elections. Well, we're talking about certain politicians. Um, is there actual evidence that election outcomes have been manipulated or influenced, or is it kind of a more subtle impact on population beliefs?

Piers: So there's increasing evidence that coordinated disinformation campaigns can change voting behaviour by a few percentage points. So there is theoretically the possibility that they could swing a close election. Proving that, of course, would be hard because it would only occur for a close election.

However, the bigger threat is perhaps the um decrease in trust regarding election results. And there was a particularly pertinent example of this in the 2024 Romanian presidential election where the um the first round was nullified. Um, in part because of fears of the influence of a Russian disinformation campaign. So there's an example of, um, false information, disinformation having a very real and tangible effect.

Cassie: Just on, on close elections, I mean, we've just had our Australian election and a lot of the seats were very close, coupled with the ability to specifically target certain electorates with social media messages, it can't be too far off the radar that it's possible to have those, um, impacts in those close seats through targeted messaging from either real or, or fake news outlets or information outlets.

Piers: I would have to agree. So there was a lot of um misinformation and disinformation going around. I should say from both sides. Um, maybe it roughly balanced out, maybe it didn't quite balance out. It would be surprising if at least some of those results weren't swung by mis and disinformation, especially due to coordinated campaigns, but we can't prove that, so we have to, as scientists be a little bit cautious about claiming that.

Nick: So it could potentially swing closely contested elections, um, and that's why we care about it because it might have all sorts of influence for who's in power. But is there any evidence it's actually caused other harms outside the political system?

Piers: So I would regard mis and disinformation as a "meta risk". The principal problem is that it reduces our ability to respond to other risks. Um, the classic example is our ability or slow response to healthcare risks.

So for example, in the 1950s, um, in the USA but also in the UK there was growing evidence linking cigarette smoking to cancer. And in response to this, the top six American tobacco companies, um, um, came together and they funded the PR firm Hill and Norton to create a decades-long disinformation campaign, which was perhaps one of the most successful um disinformation campaigns in history. Um, historically, looking back, it seems to have delayed effective legislation by at least 10 years, and the legislation that did come in was very much watered down.

It really boosted their profits and depending on who's modelling you look at, this campaign alone, and it wasn't just the single event that was um it started off on the 4th of January 1954 with this um with this advert, a frank statement to cigarette smokers which was actually viewed by 43 million Americans. So it, it was a very well funded, very big campaign. But it probably cost the lives of somewhere between 3 and 7 million Americans just by reducing the legislation which would have hampered cigarette sales. So that's one incredible example.

The reason why I picked on that example is it literally became a playbook that other commercial companies used because it had the forgive me for saying this, the genius insight that you don't have to persuade something that someone's not true. You just have to cast enough doubt that it is true, and then people will delay their actions, especially if they don't want to act. So for example, people are smoking, they're addicted, they don't want to give up smoking, and so you all you have to do is give them enough doubt and then they won't give up smoking. Legislators won't impose laws because they're getting money from taxes from this. So they don't want to do that.

So this literally created a playbook on how to most effectively create doubt and I'm talking about things like, fund scientific research that just throws doubt on the issue, um, hire fake experts to testify that the evidence isn't yet conclusive. Things like that, very effective, and other companies, um, the petrochemical industry, for example, various polluting industries, even pharmaceutical industry trying to deny that certain medications were addictive, literally use the playbook going forward.

A more modern example would be, um, COVID-19 in the US. So between May of 2021 and September 2022, over 230,000 Americans died unnecessarily due to COVID. So these were people who were offered the vaccine, refused the vaccine, went on to die, and this takes into account that not all of them would have lived had they got the vaccine.

Now, misinformation wasn't the only reason why they didn't take the vaccine. A lot of these people didn't want to take vaccines anyway, but it was an enabling factor. It cast enough doubt that it helped them decide not to take the vaccine and ultimately die.

So, we often think of misinformation's primary aim as trying to convince something of something false. That's actually not how it's generally used. It's generally used to create doubt which either delays actions or allows people to act in a way that they want to act anyway. That's a second function of mis and disinformation. The third one is actually by foreign disinformation campaigns, is to purposely designed to actually increase social divisions and weaken a country, and again, to reduce the ability of that country to take action against a foreign threat.

Cassie: Just on your playbook there, you can see that happening in the US at the moment with funding of studies to look at the link between autism and vaccines, and just the fact that they're funding those studies throws doubt on what is pretty much established as no link. And then you see the, the vaping companies doing pretty much the same playbook as the tobacco companies, often the same companies, doing the same thing with vaping that you see. So, you must see a lot of these examples just every day at the moment.

Piers: Well, yes, that's exactly right. And of course, what else you're seeing in the US is not only are these um dubious, not only is this dubious research being funded, but the proper research is being defunded and you're getting a lot of statements being um made to support um unproven scientific techniques and you're getting a lot of true scientific information removed from US government websites, again, to create confusion.

It's primarily about creating confusion.

Nick: Which presumably makes it harder to fight because it's not just telling lies, right? It's, uh, increasing doubt and there's always some doubt about pretty much any proposition, uh, I guess, uh, or removing truth rather than spreading lies. So that presumably makes it a lot harder to fight?

Piers: Yes, so that was why it was the genius insight of John W. Hill back in the 1950s that it's, it's such an easier battle to fight, not to, not to, it's impossible to prove that vaccines cause autism because they don't. But it's much easier to pour doubt on the fact that they've been proved not to cause autism and that's, that's what's going on.

Nick: You've mentioned in your work that misinformation can shift societal narratives like the illusory truth effect or normalising fringe ideas. Can you explain how this works and why it's so dangerous?

Piers: So, the illusionary truth effects is the psychological phenomenon that the more you hear something, even if it's not true and even if it's not supported by evidence, the more likely you are to believe it, or at least to begin to believe it's plausible even if you can't believe it entirely. So that's coming back to this doubt theme. You begin to doubt that it's impossible.

And the reason why this is an issue is this this concept of the Overton window, which is the range of um issues that the public think is plausible and so are willing to discuss. And using the illusionary truth effects, if you just keep on repeating extreme views, you can alter that Overton window to include um more and more extreme content and thus shift the narrative of the discussions and that's by shifting the narrative, by shifting what people are willing to discuss and entertain, um, you can often shift their decisions because one of the heuristics that people use is they tend to try and stick on the middle decision. So they hear a range of ideas and they try and pick the central one because as a heuristic, that's generally quite a um a good um thing to do.

So a heuristic is um a mental shortcut. It's a way of making an educated guess. In this case, an educated guess of whether something is true or not, but it is not a reliable method. It's a quick and dirty method which usually gives you the right answer, but not always. People who are pushing disinformation campaigns know that um as humans use heuristics and so if they can shift one end, they can shift what reasonable people trying to be reasonable but being time poor do. And that's one of the reasons why um humans fall for disinformation. We're all busy, we all have lives. We can't actually research every topic we hear about and so we need to fall back on heuristics simply to get through our lives.

When I first started in this field, there were media literacy studies which were actually trying to teach people how to spot false information and they were saying things like, you can spot a false advert by looking for misspellings, looking for unprofessional formatting. Those are heuristics, and nowadays a lot of the false information is very, very professionally done.

So humans aren't mean, they aren't out to, um, deceive other people, mostly. Some are, but most aren't, but they're time poor and forced to use heuristics, which can be exploited.

Cassie: Just on the heuristics thing, and I don't want to get too much into the anti-vax weeds because we'll get hate mail. But, um, when we're talking about how anti-vax campaigners talk about the issues, they will be very direct and assertive about their claims, and they will say, vaccines cause autism.

And then you look on the other side, and scientists aren't trained to talk like that. They talk in words like, there's no evidence that vaccines cause autism. So it's a very, from a listener's point of view, one seems very sure and one seems very kind of weak, and you can kind of see how people get led down certain paths from those heuristics just in terms of how people talk about things.

Would you suggest that scientists start to talk more certainly about their findings? Or just in terms of the, the damage that it does when we have the other side of a lot of these issues talking very, kind of with a lot of assurance in their claims.

Piers: So what you say is very true. It's been very well studied in the literature that just by giving facts and figures, even when you can't justify them, makes the message sound more plausible. But as scientists, we can't do that. We have to stick with the truth. We can't become um what would amount to being um partisan, wouldn't it? Because then we'd be trying to push a political message because once we go beyond what the science is, then we're getting political. And that's probably going to backfire. So no, I wouldn't recommend scientists do that.

But what I would recommend science, and this is actually one of the things I'm, we're doing in our lab, is explaining what the truth looks like and trying to get people not to use heuristics and not to assume that every time they see a number. On my way back when on my commute home, I pass I I go past the barbershop which um says that character is 84% innate and 16% the haircut, and they fix the 16%. Now that's a joke and we can all see it's a joke, but, um, we need to train people, and this is one of the things my lab is trying to do. So they don't fall for these simple tricks that a number means you're credible.

Cassie: What are some other things for our listeners who want to avoid being pulled by disinformation campaigns? What practical steps can they take or what things can they do to avoid falling down these rabbit holes?

Piers: So, the best advice is perhaps the most boring, which is watch what information sources you use. So the majority of Australians now um get the majority of the um news from social media. It's just popping up in their feed. Social media is a very unreliable source, consciously deciding not to get your information from an unreliable source because we all suffer from the illusionary truth effects.

And another thing we all suffer from is believing we don't suffer from the illusionary truth of facts. If you just see it more and more often, you will shift what you believe is plausible. That's just how humans are. So use reliable news sources, go out of your way to subscribe to these reliable mainstream news sources, ABC, BBC, New York Times, The Age, The Australian. Distinguish between when these reliable sources are reporting factually and when you have opinions.

A lot of people don't make that distinction. In fact, a surprisingly large amount of people cannot distinguish between a fact, a newspaper report and an advert put in this in this news newspaper with the word advert at the top, but put in the format of a newspaper article. So be clear which bit of the source you're reading and that bit is actually reliable.

But also, even the reliable news sources are now beginning to use clickbaity headlines. What pops up on social media is typically just the headline. Most people share that without even clicking on the link. So they don't even know what they're sharing because the actual article, sometimes these, these um links go to reputable articles, but the actual article, even it's reputable, might not quite encapsulate that headline. That headline is short. Um, and in some cases, some social media companies actually changed the headline as well, which is, uh, which, which can be a problem.

Don't just put things into search engines because the AI will spit out an amalgamated result which may not correspond to reality in any way. Reliable sources also include things like government websites, but also, um, Wikipedia. There's a bit of a backlash at the moment in our schools against Wikipedia. Wikipedia can be a very, very valuable source, but it sometimes misses the mark. And at the top of the Wikipedia page, there's a talk tab and if you go there, you can get a rating of how reliable that particular Wikipedia page is.

And although the article itself may be unreliable, that rating is usually very good indeed. And I would argue because of the illusionary truth effect, if that rating is low, don't, don't read, don't think, oh, OK, this, this isn't reliable, but I'm gonna read it anyway and I'll just, you know, be sceptic because you will end up fooling yourself.

Cassie: A lot of those tactics of critical thinking are tactics that the misinformation side will often say that they're doing, right? They'll say, don't fall for the, you know, don't be a sheep, don't follow this, this is the real truth. And they kind of believe that they're critical thinkers and doing all those things. They're just going to the real source rather than the fake news. So, how do you get around people thinking that they are doing all those things? It's just that they're being led to the wrong sources.

Piers: So that's the million dollar question. And I'll just be straight, I don't have a good answer, and the field doesn't have a good answer. Our answer used to be go to third party fact checkers. Now we have Breitbart doing fact checking and those fact checks bear no resemblance at all to any of the other fact checkers. But people are quoting these Breitbart fact checks. They're quoting, um, um, Fox News.

So you have an alternative information ecosystem and we're not really sure how to deal with it. We thought that you could go to the ultimate source of truth, which would be science. Well, hasn't that been proved wrong?

I remember a junior member of faculty coming up to me being terribly, terribly excited. Because he knew I I studied misinformation and he had the solution. The solution was very simple for him. Australia needed an independent scientific body which would research um topics which were important to elections and give the facts to the Australian people. So of course I mentioned CSIRO, I mentioned the nuclear report, and I mentioned that it was pretty much ignored by a certain party.

We don't have a good answer. So my lab is trying other ways. That, that's what you, what you're talking about is too hard for us to tackle. But there's other ways you can do. There's the foot in the door technique. You can talk about other values and you can build up getting people more and more reasonable, and then eventually they can perhaps realise that perhaps Fox News isn't always so factually accurate.

Nick: So looking ahead, do you think the fight against misinformation, disinformation will be getting easier or harder with AI and other technological advances?

Piers: It's gonna change, but I don't think it's gonna get either easier or harder. So AI is having a huge, huge impact. So we're now getting far more sophisticated botnets, which are coordinating in far more human-like manners, um, and, um, and also even in some cases acting as sleepers.

So in the past, you would be befriended by what who you thought was a human but was actually a bot and would immediately try to persuade you to do something, vote for this person or don't vote for that person. Now they can act like your friends for maybe 6 months and then try and persuade you to do something. So it's getting pretty sophisticated, sending out personalised messages is getting increasingly easy with these large language models.

The game is changing very much, but also we're developing techniques using AI to spot these botnets, to spot this inauthentic activity, and also to, um, there's quite a lot of work done by Costello and David Rand, and Gordon Pennycook, who um, Thomas Costello, who are using large language models to try and talk people out of conspiracies. It's again though, when someone really goes down the rabbit hole, it can be quite hard, but they're, these large language models are more effective than a human in many cases because they can engage at the level of detail of a conspiracy theorist.

So people have gone down the rabbit hole, they often know a lot of detail about the conspiracy theories, and when they, forgive me, when a normal human starts talking to them, we haven't spent 3 years studying this particular conspiracy theory, so we don't know this level of detail, but a large language model can work at that level of detail and give um some information which can be accepted. I have to say the effect size so far aren't that large, but at least they're sustainable. So we shall see.

Cassie: I guess the other thing with these conspiracy theory groups is, you know, we've talked about how to talk them out of it, but sometimes it's not about the facts, it's they've found their group, they've found a sense of belonging, that identity. Whenever those beliefs become part of that person's identity, then it becomes less about the facts of the conspiracy and more that they're getting all of these social needs from that group, and it's very hard to just convince them out of that with facts, right? It becomes a harder sell to pull them away from what might be their only social connection, which I think is another challenge with a lot of these conspiracy groups.

Piers: Oh, very much so. So, some of the standard advice for how to deal with people with conspiracies is well, firstly, don't try and refute what they're saying because that's what they're doing. And if, and if, if that would have worked, they would no longer be into conspiracies. So you know that's a dead end. But try um and find out why they believe in it and also try and find out what need it's satisfying in their life. So what caused them to go down that rabbit hole.

So my mother-in-law, um, became a conspiracy theorist. Um, she very much went down several rabbit holes and conspiracy theorists typically don't believe in just one conspiracy theory. There's often, um, a series of related conspiracy theories. And in her case, um, she was feeling quite lonely, quite isolated, and as you said, it provided a support network.

I work with people in Melbourne Connect who actually study conspiracy beliefs. And one of the things that shocked me was them reporting how supportive um the support networks are. Um, and this was someone um studying the manosphere and these, these, um, these men, these um incels, involuntary and celibates, um, would go on the spaces and tell everyone their um problems and they would actually receive support and it was in some sense, a positive experience had not the group actually been focused on being misogynistic. Um, so it's gonna be very hard to talk someone out of that because these people clearly didn't have a social life outside this and were unable to create normal connections with human beings. So it can be hard.

Nick: OK, Piers, so what's one final takeaway or piece of advice you'd like to leave our listeners with as they navigate today's very, very challenging information landscape.

Piers: So, we were discussing this a little bit earlier, Nick, and um I think you would agree with me when, when I say there's a bit of a feeling of despondency. A lot of us are feeling a bit of dragged down about international events, about perhaps domestic events, feeling all a bit overwhelmed. So I'd actually like to end on a somewhat hopeful note.

That you're actually more powerful than you realise. You can actually access reliable information easier than perhaps you realise, and you can actually fend off these mis and disinformation campaigns easier than you might think. And so it would just be to encourage people to actually take the time and think, is this really true? Is this not? Lateral reading, just, you've received some information before you read it all, start checking, do other reliable sources say this sort of thing? Um.

It's actually quite easy to spot a lot of misinformation if you just take a few seconds to do so. So I would end on a positive note, don't get despondent. This too shall pass and um lots of us are working on solutions to it.

Cassie: Fascinating. Thank you for joining us today, Piers, and I think you've given our listeners and us a lot to think about and take away.

Nick: Thank you very much.

Cassie: And that brings us to the end of today's conversation. A huge thank you to Associate Professor Piers Howe for helping us understand how misinformation works and what we can do about it.

Nick: This episode of PsychTalks was produced by Carly Godden with production support from Mairead Murray and Gemma Papprill. Sound engineering by Jack Palmer. Thanks so much for joining us, and if you don't already, please subscribe so you can catch every episode in the series. We'll see you next time.