Lying Down

Here's a really cold take on things: If you tell someone something that they really want to believe, because it lines up with something that has high emotional salience for them, there's a good chance they'll believe it.

This isn't new. So why do journalists (of all people) seem to have so much trouble understanding that this is how people work? "America's Gullibility Crisis" is an article from Axios that mainly demonstrates, well, if you tell someone something that they really want to believe, because it lines up with something that has high emotional salience for them, there's a good chance they'll believe it.

Surprising, I know. But when Texas Republican Chip Roy shares a headline that turns out to be faked, or "Pro-Harris accounts" claim that Karl Rove is campaigning on her behalf, the reason these things catch on is simple: Republicans want to believe that Democrats could only win November's election via fraudulent means, and Democrats want to believe that Donald Trump is so loathsome that even Karl Rove would rather see Vice President Harris win.

I'm not clear on why this is so difficult to understand, or why it's considered newsworthy. Wishful thinking isn't a new concept. Part of it may be that this all seems really sudden. The American public didn't seem so invested in partisan and personality-driven politics a decade ago, and journalists may not have been prepared for the phenomenon, even though it's been there all along. But I suspect that this is also something that been relatively rare in affluent White communities. The sort of motivated reasoning that underlies Axios' "gullibility crisis" had been more common in poor and minority communities (where people felt that government didn't work for them, or was actively working against them); but that's not where the national media spent much time. So, like any number of other concerns, it was safe to ignore until it "went mainstream," as it were.

But while motivated information intake and reasoning may be alarming to journalists, especially those that lean Left, for most people, it simply isn't a problem. There's no cost to them for believing that Democrats are plotting to falsify election results or that high-level Republicans are abandoning Trump's ship. It simply doesn't matter; no-one's paychecks depend on them getting that information correct. And correct information is only useful to the degree that it makes things work better or more smoothly. In politics and culture (especially during culture wars), that's simply not the case. And if there's no benefit to being right, why wouldn't one expect people to believe whatever they want to?