The illusion of truth

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Why do people fall for fake news? There are a multitude of reasons. One is what we call the illusory truth effect, which comes from research showing that if you expose people to a bunch of statements —some true and some false— and you repeat them over time, people are more likely to think that repeated statements are true even when they are false.

Unfortunately, a lot of fake news is often repeated by influential actors time and time again, which really causes it to stick in people's minds and memories. This goes back to classic propaganda. Germany’s minister for propaganda, who's credited with the big lie rule, said that if you “tell a lie big enough and often enough, eventually people will believe it”.

Fake news as a way to fit in

There are also social and political explanations for why people believe in fake news. Think about how we all belong to different groups and want to be liked by them. If those groups share something that seems important to them, you might share it as well — and you might even believe in it because it demonstrates that you belong to and affiliate with that group.

This often manifests itself in political groups, especially in countries like the United States, where the political climate is very polarised. Political identity and your political worldview shape what information you're more likely to believe in. So if you come to the table with strong beliefs about a subject, fake news plays into that. You’re more likely to grab onto that piece of news because it fits with how you already think about the world.

Some people refer to this as confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, and that’s part of the explanation. But broadly, there are two camps. One side of the debate says, ‘Most people really aren't that political. Most people aren't extreme. It's just the attention economy. We're inattentive or bombarded with information. We just need some help processing it properly.’

Whereas the other camp says, ‘No, actually, everyone is politically motivated and we all have prior beliefs and goals. People just want to belong to their tribe and communicate what fits with their tribe. Everyone just sees the world as they want to see it.’ In our research, we’ve shown that both explanations are true.

Propaganda on steroids

Is what we’re seeing today new, or is it just a repetition of classical propaganda that we've seen throughout the ages? The building blocks of propaganda broadly remain the same in the sense that the techniques used to dupe people are similar. However, the way in which it's disseminated and delivered today is radically different from, say, the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s — mainly because people didn't have the Internet then. If you wanted to spread your conspiracy theory, you had to print propaganda, distribute it widely and go speak to specific groups. It took longer, with more investment and resources. Now, the barrier to entry is so low that anyone can start a news website or blog. Things can go viral much more quickly, reaching millions of people at low cost. People can be targeted with fake news based on their online digital footprint.

So while some of the classic ingredients are the same in terms of how we manufacture propaganda, the way in which it's targeted and delivered has gone to a whole new level in which people are making money from the production of misinformation. And social media has amplified the reach of fake news, disseminating it through filter bubbles and echo chambers, which cause polarisation.

Basically, what we're seeing at the moment is classic propaganda on steroids, which is why it's so difficult to deal with.

The dark side of persuasion

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Persuasion has gotten a bit of a bad name nowadays, but the first thing I teach my students in my influence class is that we're persuading people all day long with everything we do and say. Sometimes we even persuade people without intending to, e.g. with our body language, which means we’re always influencing each other all the time. In that process, people become persuaded of ideas, and sometimes those ideas are good and positive and sometimes they’re harmful and negative. The persuasion process in itself isn't good or bad, but the way that it's leveraged can be harmful if it's used for bad purposes, like misinformation, fake news and political propaganda.

In addition, the persuasion process has an important relationship with trust in the sense that people expect to be informed — but not necessarily persuaded without their knowledge. And I think this is the key distinction. People come to your door trying to sell you things. We know that political candidates lie; we know that they have an agenda. And that's fine, people are used to that kind of persuasion. But what people are not used to is being persuaded without their knowledge, being targeted without their knowledge and being duped through mining their data and their online behaviour without having consented to do so.

Trust: hard to build, easy to lose

I’m fine with being persuaded of some things. If I want to lose a bit of weight, for example, or exercise a little more, you can persuade me all you want. I have knowledge of it and I'm consenting to the persuasion process. But with a lot of fake news and misinformation that's happening now, people are not consenting and they're being targeted without their knowledge.

This comes back to the issue of trust. Psychologically, people have a very asymmetrical relationship with trust. Trust is very difficult to build and very easy to lose, which is why it’s such a tricky concept. One of the most important consequences and risks of fake news misinformation is that it erodes people's trust in the media, in the government and in official institutions — and when we lose that trust, we really lose the basis of democracy.

A post-truth society?

We have an abundance of resources and information for fact checking. If you want to know something, you can go on Google, you can go to Wikipedia, you can go to your library, you can find facts and high quality information easily and efficiently and you can share it with everyone.

Compare that to 50 or 60 years ago, when people were listening to the radio and receiving propaganda — and how difficult it was to fact check what was being said. Now, it’s easy. However, what appears to be the case is that people are not fact checking. They're not obtaining that high quality information. Not always but often, people seem to be using the new media environment as a way to validate their own beliefs, to motivate their political agendas, to selectively interpret facts and to share fake news. So, although we have this immense capacity for facts, for some reason we see people polarising away from the facts.

That is what people refer to as post-truth: this idea that even though we have the ability to understand truth more deeply than ever before, we seem to be going in an entirely different direction.

Reasons why we fall for fake news

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In terms of what is working or not working correctly, you can use Daniel Kahneman’s famous “System 1, System 2” metaphor. A lot of people think that what's happening here is that our System 1, which is our intuitive system of understanding the world, is often taking over and being duped by fake news because our System 2, i.e. our analytical and deliberative thinking, is not kicking in appropriately. We don't have enough steer from our more analytical, deliberative System 2.

Then there are others who think that what's going on is erosion of trust and the degree of political polarisation and other social and motivational factors that lead people to want to believe fake news rather than only being duped by it.

Another way to cast this question is to ask why conspiracy theories that were traditionally only endorsed by the fringes of society have become mainstream. Why are people sharing them so much? I think it has to do with the fact that whenever we're dealing with times of great economic and social uncertainty, as we're seeing today, whether it’s the pandemic or climate change, it makes people reflect on what we call “existential motives”, which are reflections on our own death and future. Whenever that happens, there is an increased demand for conspiracy theories, propaganda and misinformation, and that's something you see throughout history.

Discover more about

The rise of fake news

van der Linden, S., & Löfstedt, R.E. (Eds.). (2019). Risk and Uncertainty in a Post-Truth Society. Routledge.

van der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C., & Roozenbeek, J. (2020). You Are Fake News: Political Bias in Perceptions of Fake News. Media, Culture & Society, 42(3), 460–470.

van der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C., Azevedo, F., et al. (2020). The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking. Political Psychology.

The reasons we fall for fake news