CityPages Kuwait June 2016 Issue June 2016 | Page 87

always provide a ‘balanced’ viewpoint.
Together with the media, its elder brother – perhaps Big Brother - has
to be the Internet. Do we use a capital letter deliberately, I wonder?
There are a lot of good things to be said about the internet but it’s
still a source of massive quantities of misinformation. People with no
qualifications, experience or maturity can post whatever they like and
sieving the wheat from the chaff is something which people with an
education are supposed to be quite good at, but it turns out not always
to be the case. Here’s a frightening fact. Look up ‘weight loss diets’.
Only about 3% of the links offer proper sound dietary advice. The rest
is a mish-mash of crackpot ideas, things that worked for somebody’s
cousin’s mother and the digital equivalent of snake-oil salesmanship.
Also, people tend to seek out information that confirms their existing
points of view and this is an exercise that has become much easier now
that the Internet provides such a huge range of viewpoints. No matter
what people believe, there’s always somebody else out there who also
believes the same to back them up, even though the original hypothesis
is deeply flawed.
Why do people believe misinformation? It’s pretty clear that lies and
half-truths are floating about all over the place. But if we all know that
politicians, the media and the internet sometimes – even more often
than not - tell lies, then how come some people end up believing it?
The problem is that the way people go about believing things (or not)
is fundamentally weird. Few of us bother to actually check solid facts
for ourselves; most of us use mental short-cuts, presumably to save
ourselves the trouble of actually doing any hard mental processing. We
often pond-skate over the argument by asking ourselves ‘Does it feel
right?’ In other words, does the new information square with what I
already understand, or believe? Then, ‘Does it make sense?’ Things
that are easy to understand are easier to believe. Our minds tend to
reject complicated stuff - it’s too demanding to process - defending
itself by saying: ‘Oh, it’s probably a lie, but who cares?’
At the heart of critical thinking is this question: ‘Is the source believable?’
People who seem authoritative, like those in positions of power, are
more likely to be believed. For example, doctors can create havoc by
giving bad advice in public because people tend to believe them.
Also ‘Who else believes it?’ People prefer to go along with the herd.
Unfortunately, people also have an inbuilt bias towards thinking that
most other people agree with them, even if, in reality, they don’t. But

this still doesn’t explain why people continue to believe all kinds of
weird stuff, even after it’s been proven to them that it’s false. It turns out
that even once misinformation has been completely retracted and those
involved have admitted it was all a farrago of lies, the misinformation
virus is difficult to kill.
One compelling reason for this is based on how memory works: we tend
to find it much easier to recall the gist of things rather than the exact
details. Usually this is handy because it means we can learn specific
things, such as cooking meat makes it easier to digest, and generalise
it to the fact that cooking makes many foods more palatable. The
downside is that it’s easy for people to remember the gist of some piece
of misinformation (fairies live at the bottom of the garden), but forget
that they heard it from a totally unreliable source (a wide-eyed threeyear-old). So, it’s not a bad idea to have a few tools in the box to enable
us to attack the spectre of misinformation when it sticks its head over
the parapet.
Firstly, offer ‘truth plus’. Changing people’s minds isn’t just about telling
them they are wrong; if only it were! To be convinced, people need to
hear an alternative account that explains why something happened, not
just that the misinformation is wrong. Ideally, it should also explain the
motivations for the lie. Embellishment of the truth adds validity.
Secondly, the KISS rule applies - ‘keep it simple, stupid…’ This
alternative account shouldn’t be too complicated. The shorter it is, the
sweeter it will work. Give people too much and they switch off; just a
few salient facts will do.
Next, try to avoid repeating the myth. Remember that people find the
gist of things easiest to recall. By repeating the myth, you’re shooting
yourself in the foot by imprinting it on people’s minds.
Remember when you were little? Mama fed you by saying ‘here comes
the airplane…’ and you opened your mouth to get the rice pudding,
or whatever. So, tell people beforehand that there is misleading
information coming. Afterwards, keep banging it home, repeating
the facts. Each repetition builds up the rebuttal’s strength in people’s
minds. The power of repetition to influence people is clear – just look
at how any dictatorship works.
Most of the previous are basically defensive tools but it doesn’t hurt to
go on the attack from time to time. Go after them. What is the source
of the misinformation? And what do they know? Nothing! Encouraging
people to be a little more sceptical can help. One of the challenges
here is that people tend to believe those who say things that fit in with
their personal worldview. So that’s why it’s important to affirm the
worldview of your audience, which tends to keep them onside, even
if you’re telling them things they don’t want to hear. For example,
Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
during the darkest days of the Second World War when the threat of
Nazi Germany loomed largest. On his election in May 1940, he made
a speech to the British House of Commons. He said: ‘I have nothing to
offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of
the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of
struggle and of suffering.’
Not a great election manifesto, but, see what followed:
‘You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at
all costs - Victory in spite of all terror - Victory, however long and hard
the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.’
For years afterward, his famous V sign reinforced the point. Telling
people things they don’t want to hear is a balancing act. You have to go
far enough to make the point, then overco me their natural resistance
by identity affirmation. So, as Churchill did, you might indirectly get
people to think about things that are important to them like their
family, friends and ideals.
Finally, much as we’d all love to believe that the late lamented Terry
Pratchett’s Discworld is real, there isn’t really a waterfall at the edge,
and the four elephants that hold it up aren’t standing on a giant turtle,
after all. What a shame. We’ll have to make to with reality instead.
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