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Whatsapp Studies demonstrate that when people are shown facts that contradict their erroneous beliefs, it often reinforces them.

With an unprecedented amount of information at our fingertips, it should be easier than ever for us to distinguish between facts and lies. Yet facts are valued less and less in our political debate and there has never been so much misinformation available. Antony Funnell reports.

In modern politics, it seems, there are lies, damn lies and facts.

Time was when an argument, be it political, scientific or cultural, could be settled by reference to 'the facts'. Not anymore, according to New York University’s Professor Mary Poovey.

She says facts no longer aid clarity of debate, they simply add to confusion. ‘I think that when expertise is having to do battle with opinion in a world in which everyone gets to have an opinion and everyone gets to express their opinion and other people can read all of those opinions, it's very difficult for people to come to a consensus about what expert knowledge is or whether indeed there should be expert knowledge,’ she says.

If you look at politics and if you look at voting patterns globally you can see a strong movement towards more conservative parties. If you listen to their platforms, if you listen to what they're saying it's about the truths of our older sort of collective memories.

That, according to Professor Poovey, author of A History of the Modern Fact, goes a long way to explaining why contemporary politics is now so divisive and polarised: why ‘the facts’ can be used by members of the Abbott government to support, for instance, their claim that Australia is in the midst of an economic and budgetary ‘emergency’ while others, such as the Greens, the Labor Party and Clive Palmer can use a different set of facts to assert the exact opposite.

Simply put, facts, according to Professor Poovey, are no longer the arbitrator of conflict or disagreement, but devices that are used by people to reinforce their existing perceptions and/or prejudices.

‘We live in a world in which opinion saturates everything and people tend to seek out on the internet or on their television set confirmation of their own opinions and own beliefs,’ she says. ‘We may say we're looking for truth, but I think that what most people are looking for is a confirmation that what they believe is right.’

By Professor Poovey’s reasoning, the modern fact has become a largely subjective phenomenon, and one that is almost entirely subservient to belief. However, it hasn’t always been that way.

‘Historically there has been an extremely important role for this idea of the fact. The problem is that as media forms have proliferated in the 20th century and 21st century, and as political opinions have become more diverse, facts are no longer able to outweigh other kinds of motives. So appeals to facts are no longer able to play the kind of adjudicating social authority role that they used to be able to play,' she says.

‘From the political left, as it were, facts have been attacked on the basis that there is always a certain amount of self-interest in any claim to be a fact, even on the part of natural scientists. And on the right, of course, facts are accused of being ideologically charged as well. So I think that in some ways the whole poststructuralist movement, post-modernist movement in the '70s and '80s and '90s has helped undermine the credibility of the fact. But I think without social consensus, whether you call it fact or whether you call it simply for the welfare of the nation or the welfare of the globe, without social consensus it's very hard to see how the world is going to get beyond the kind of sectarian divisions that we're now living with.’

Of course, facts don’t just arise of their own accord. They have to be formulated. And they aren’t just used to shore-up personal or political belief; they’re often deliberately deployed as weapons of influence and change.

‘Misinformation is everywhere,’ says Ullrich Ecker, a cognitive scientist from the University of Western Australia’s School of Psychology. ‘“Obama is a Muslim, vaccinations cause autism, asylum seekers are breaking the law, and GM foods cause cancer.” Unfortunately, retracting this information—just saying it is not true—does very little to alleviate the effects of misinformation.’

Dr Ecker argues that the time-poor nature of modern life inhibits genuine inquiry; as does the complexity of our digital world. He says both of those factors together force people to make shortcuts in the way in which they evaluate ‘factual’ claims.

‘Constantly updating and correcting our understanding of the world is a big task,’ he says. ‘We don't have the time, the resources or the motivation to assess the evidence for each and every claim we encounter. So sometimes we just have to go with the heuristics: how does this fit with what I already know? How does it fit with what I believe? What do other people think about this? And so on. Usually these heuristics are benign. However, when people's beliefs are very strong, those beliefs will bias information processing and will lead to what we know as “motivated reasoning”. That's when people with strong beliefs and motivations tend to interpret information in a way that supports their beliefs.’

‘Obviously motivated reasoning is a major obstacle for rational argument. So if someone wants to believe that Obama is a Muslim or if someone wants to believe that virtually all of the world's climate scientists have conspired to make up a huge global climate change hoax, it's very difficult to change their minds, even when the actual evidence is very, very clear.’

Motivated reasoning, Dr Ecker argues, is facilitated by the contemporary media landscape.

‘There is a lack of fact-checking in much of the new media, where the main focus is on getting information out quickly and where information is spread not based on veracity but based mainly on its likelihood of evoking an emotional response in the recipient.’

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For US researcher Brendan Nyhan, avoiding misinformation is all about having what he terms a ‘healthy information diet’. Dr Nyhan is an assistant professor in government studies at Dartmouth College in the United States. He takes issue with the commonly held notion that the digital world makes us more knowledgeable; that simply by having access to more information, a populous is better informed.

‘When people were being idealistic about how the internet was going to revolutionise democracy, I don't think they took seriously enough people's desire to be proven right and to find information that is consistent with their point of view,’ says Dr Nyhan. ‘Here in the United States there is all sorts of information available for a voter who really does want to be better informed, but it's also very easy to wrap yourself in a cocoon of information.’

Cocooning in that way, says Dr Nyhan, represents a fundamental limitation of human psychology. ‘I think it's important to remember that we all do this,’ he says. ‘We rely on our predispositions to filter the information that is out there, to make judgements about what is or is not likely to be true. And if any of us look at the information we choose to consume, I think we'll frequently find that it is slanted towards our point of view.’

‘We would drive ourselves crazy if we tried to objectively weigh the evidence for every single thing we did as human beings, we would go crazy. But as voters and as citizens we do have this problem of maintaining a balanced point of view—and especially maintaining a point of view that is consistent with the facts.’

One element of Dr Nyhan’s recent research has been to test just how difficult it is to change people’s mindset once they’ve accepted the validity of a given fact.

As part of one study he presented participants with a mock news article about the former US President George W. Bush; an article which included a deliberate mistake about the then-president’s tax policies. He later followed up that first statement with another article containing a correction.

What he and his colleague found was that the correction had little impact on those participants who wanted to believe the veracity of the initial statement. But more than that, it actually made their belief in the original story stronger. That is, the correction only served to strengthen their original mistaken belief. Dr Nyhan calls this the ‘backfire effect’.

‘We think it has very troubling implications for how we try to correct misperceptions in education and the media. If we come in with some point of view and we're challenged in that point of view, sometimes we'll go along with that correction, but if we object to it strongly enough, or we're threatened enough by the information it contains, we argue back in our own minds,’ he says. ‘In the process of doing that, sometimes we end up convincing ourselves more strongly in the idea that is being challenged than we would have otherwise.’

Dr Nyhan says the backfire effect helps to explain why many people continue to deny the existence of human-induced climate change, despite the wealth of scientific evidence available.

‘It's very hard to change people's minds,’ he says. ‘Climate change is a great example of an issue where, as the issue has become more politicised, people have divided more sharply along the political lines that we see in the United States and in Australia as well. Our theory of what's going on when people receive corrective information that they don't like, is that it is threatening to them, it's threatening to their world-view or their sense of themselves.’

It is threatening also, adds Sydney-based sociologist Dr Alphia Possamai-Inesedy, to people’s sense of belonging.

Dr Possamai-Inesedy argues that to understand the difficulty we currently have with the notion of the fact, it helps to think of them as 'truths'; and to think of them not just as snippets of information, but as performing an important historical role as a type of social glue.

She says one of the main ways in which we as societies, communities and small social groups bind together is by agreeing—consciously or subconsciously—to certain beliefs, which are then expressed as facts or truths.

In that sense, Dr Possamai-Inesedy suggests, facts become part of the collective knowledge and memory of a group. That collective knowledge can differ significantly between different groupings within a larger community. In other words, instead of thinking of facts as objective realities—as expressions of verifiable evidence—Dr Possamai-Inesedy says we need to recognise them as social constructions.

‘Beyond the social glue, truths create a type of identity and they create a type of security at the same time,’ she contends. ‘So if we're going to speak about questioning the truth, that can be quite scary for us. That can be quite frightening, cause anxiety, create ideas of risk. So you not only have the social glue aspect, not only have the identity aspect, but you also have the security aspect of holding onto particular truths.’

With a potentially frightening issue like global climate change, argues Dr Possamai-Inesedy, it’s little wonder then that people with already strong political leanings—whether right or left—readily fall back on the collective knowledge of their political grouping for guidance about what they should believe.

The trouble with facts Australia is once again in an era of polarised politics, and from climate change to the 'budget emergency' our politics can't even agree on 'the facts'.

In an increasingly complex world, dominated by conflicting opinions, that craving for truth, for a return to the ideal of the objective fact, is leading more and more people toward increasing conservatism and fundamentalism, argues Dr Possamai-Inesedy.

‘If you look at politics and if you look at voting patterns globally you can see a strong movement towards more conservative parties. If you listen to their platforms, if you listen to what they're saying it's about the truths of our older sort of collective memories. The same thing is true with forms of religious fundamentalism. It's about creating those traditions, those truths for us: bringing security.’

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