Trust me, it’s fake news

Once, in my teenage adventures around Tel Aviv, I happened upon a fluke discovery. As I was walking to a specific address in the city, I noticed that the house numbers on my side of the street were out of sequence. It was no biggie, just a small jump from 47 to 51 and skipping 49, but I made a mental note of it. Over the years, I collected more and more examples of these kinds of sequence interruptions in house numberings across assorted metropolises. I even recorded these freak address disruptions in a special notebook. I found these aberrations fascinating, and it got me thinking.

Before long, I plotted a new slapdash psychological experiment. Every time I took a taxi – we are talking about a time before Uber and Lyft – to or from one of my lectures or magic shows, I'd engage the driver in a friendly conversation about magic. When the opportune moment came about, I'd casually mention that I once "vanished a building but couldn't bring it back." Most drivers were skeptical and perhaps thought I was a nutjob, but occasionally I'd get a cabby who was keen on hearing more. I'd make sure to mention the street address of the missing house, knowing that at least some of them would be curious enough to check it out. I also knew that many of these drivers were yappers: they liked to make conversation to pass the time while driving, and I counted on them to disseminate my story far and wide within the community.

Sure enough, word got around. One day, I heard a story about a "paranormalist" who vanished a house at the address that I'd indicated. What's more, the driver who related the story to me – someone I've never met before – swore that he was present at the show and saw it with his own eyes. Any good game of broken telephone will end with a completely different story than it began with, and I was pleased to see how my original scheme developed so nicely. Another driver told me about a disgruntled "sorcerer" who vanished an entire building because he didn't get paid for his performance. It was duly amusing, but the tale came with an address I hadn't heard of before – it wasn't in my little notebook. Just as curious as the cabbies I'd duped, I headed to that address and discovered a perfectly erect house in good standing. I suppose I must have restored the vanished building after finally receiving payment. Even powerful magicians cannot remember well; as we discovered in Chapter 6, memory is unreliable.

Consider another example, an experiment that examined the issue of abortion in the Republic of Ireland. This is an issue that prompts divisive discourse within the public; moreover, Ireland used to host some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, mostly because it has been a primarily Catholic country and is against it based on religious beliefs. Researchers asked participants to look over short news stories of campaign events, accompanied by a photograph, and to tell them how well they remembered the event, where they had heard of it, and how they had felt about it. Some of these events were true items that really happened, but some were specious, baseless, and fabricated.

Looking for false memories in the week preceding the 2018 Irish abortion referendum, about half of the study's three thousand participants reported a false memory for at least one of two fabricated scandals that researchers had circulated, with more than one-third of participants reporting a specific memory of that made-up event. As you may expect, voters in favor of legalizing abortion were more likely to "remember" a fabricated scandal regarding the opposing campaign, and vice versa. In other words, people suggest themselves into remembering things that didn't happen when it serves their belief system.

Another interesting bit is that suggesting to people that they may have been exposed to fake news did very little to reduce the rates of false memories and did not eliminate this effect of bias, with participants less likely to detect fake news that was in line with their beliefs. As we have already seen, people are easily suggestible when it comes to party lines.

In politics, fake information has become the main currency of our time; politicians circulate all sorts of communications to get us to vote for them – and many people actually believe them. Naturally, we are more susceptible to suggestions that reaffirm beliefs we already hold. So when researchers presented doctored photographs of President Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran as a news item, Republicans were predisposed to accept this information. The same is true on the other side of the aisle: Democrats are more likely to "remember" the time President Bush vacationed with a professional baseball player during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Although both of these fabricated stories never happened, this adherence to party lines stands out as a robust human tendency that caters to our suggestible brain. In this regard, perhaps what has changed isn't the fact that modern politicians lie differently than they did before, but that we are now more amenable to and more accepting of their suggestive narratives.

* * *

Only a few short decades ago, three main news channels dominated American TVs: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Whether you consumed your news from one or the other two made little difference; they shared the same ideological leanings, and the information they communicated was largely the same. Today, on the other hand, the situation has turned on its head: we have a huge selection of news sources to choose from, each promoting explicit ideas and sometimes ulterior agendas, and people listen to what they want to hear. Subsequently, in our modern world of multisource media, we can no longer agree on the facts, we cannot settle on what constitutes reality, and we have little consensus about truth and trust.

Truthiness – not truth itself but the truth we'd like to be true, the truth that feels good and right – was word of the year for 2005 (by the American Dialect Society) and 2006 (by Merriam-Webster). Who can tell me that George Washington was a slaveholder if I want to believe that he wasn't? It feels powerful to turn factoids into concepts we wish or believe to be true, rather than follow bona fide facts. Are you concerned about the nearly extinct northern white rhinoceros? You can "save" them by rewriting their population number on Wikipedia. This form of Wikiality brings "democracy" to information.

The ascent of parallel Wikipedias around the world epitomizes the dawn of relative truth. Wikipedia is perhaps the first encyclopedia in the history of humanity that contains explicit inconsistencies and incongruences relative to differing human experiences. For example, among the fifty million entries in hundreds of languages, if you compare the entry for "Jerusalem" in the Arabic and Hebrew versions, you'll find different content. The longer and more detailed Arabic version focuses on the city's history, culture, and demographics as well as its religious significance to Islam and Christianity, whereas the Hebrew version focuses on the city's religious significance to Judaism. In addition, some ideological communities adopt the Wikipedic model and create their own versions – for example, by excluding references to evolution – thereby penetrating different social spheres and organizing knowledge according to the beliefs and perspectives of specific sectors.

In the US, this trend has set new records, with about one-third of the population being of the opinion that President Biden was elected illegitimately; millions of people have become convinced that the 2020 elections were fake. That's both astonishing and scary. Moreover, social polarization and the fact that people live in separate "worlds of knowledge" within the same country make it very difficult to believe in and follow a single leader. In the US, specific leaders – through their personalities and actions – have spawned tremendous social disunity. Even more disturbing, social media platforms now add a twist to this fabric: if you put "climate change" in your search, for example, you will get different answers based on whether you are connecting from the Northern or the Southern US states. In other words, you will receive different information on whether or not climate change is a "hoax" based on your location!

Fake news has an economic advantage because lies work better than truth on the web: sensationalism and clickbait sell. Specific com munities engage with fake news sources, and publishers with weak journalistic standards typically produce misinformation – false information devoid of the intention to deceive or mislead – and downright disinformation, a deliberate, intentional effort to mislead by spreading false information. Once produced, fake news stories diffuse farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth. Whether deliberately or unwittingly, humans – potentiated by suggestibility, exposure to social media, and, more recently, exposure to artificial intelligence applications – are increasingly losing their ability to tell the difference between what's true and what seems true.

Today, we know that social media has caused a lot of damage, for example by weakening the fabric of societal consensus. Online conspiracies have increased the number of Holocaust deniers, anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, and other theorizers who consume alternative scientific and historical ideas. People immerse themselves in online communities that tell them what they want to hear. In this way, they create Petri dishes for complementary worlds to thrive without interruption. Group recommendation algorithms further abet the spread of misinformation.

Living in a post-truth era is challenging. No matter how careful you are, and what precautions you take, fake news will get you. In addition, deepfake – the ability to easily and cheaply generate convincing images, audio, and video via artificial intelligence applications and through machine learning – is now on the rise. For many Americans, let alone for global citizens of the world, the combination of fake news, alternative facts, and deepfakes has called into question how we construe reality itself. We need to have the touch of a magic illusionist and a dab of a research scientist to navigate our confusing world.

Suggestion and Social Justice

Can we leverage research findings about suggestion to advance social causes and promote agendas concerning race, gender, and topical issues related to our cultural mosaic? I think we can, but I think it requires some serious commitment by our political, community, and science leaders, perhaps peppered with a smidgeon of how magicians think.

More than four hundred years after the first slave ship arrived in America, can suggestion help correct racial inequalities, bigotry, and hatred? After all, the police are more likely to kill people with mental disabilities, especially disabled people of color, than their neurotypical counterparts; hospitals are more likely to report Black and Latino families for child abuse, and more likely to avoid reporting comparable situations in white families; practitioners of mental health are more likely to misdiagnose African American patients with major depressive disorder as having schizophrenia, in part due to a racial bias, and the unconscious bias of physicians may further contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in medical procedures. Can suggestions make a difference?

Social psychologists have long studied how malleable our automatic attitudes are and whether we can counteract such involuntary prejudice. For example, researchers found that exposure to pictures of admired Black and disliked white individuals reduced implicit preference for white over Black Americans. In other words, by repeatedly showing participants photographs of famous and respected Black people, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and photographs of infamous and disapproved white people, such as criminal and cult leader Charles Manson, negative attitudes waned by more than 50 percent. Similarly, videos of Black people during positive activities such as going to church or enjoying a family barbecue also reduced implicit bias. These early efforts to change the social context and, through it, reduce automatic prejudice and preference have paved the road to diversity education.

Today, regulators and diversity and equity initiatives in the workplace require teachers, physicians, managers, and employees to undergo cultural sensitivity training. But such forcing may result in a backlash because of reactance – the need to preserve psychological autonomy. People who go through such mandatory interventions sometimes perceive the training as a threat to their freedom of expression, or they simply take offense at the intimation that they may entertain a prejudice in the first place. 

Although nearly all colleges and universities, as well as most workplaces in America, conduct diversity training workshops, few institutions actually care to assess and evaluate their effectiveness. Research findings suggest that pressure to conform to minority-focused standards, or similar cultural benchmarks, rarely yields uniformly positive effects, and may actually backfire. In other words, these training programs seldom work well and may even make things worse.

What's the alternative? People tend to suppress racial prejudice when feedback indicates that many others disagree with their racially prejudiced stance. In this way, providing consensus information may be a more effective way to change racial beliefs. We know that the opinions of in-group members carry more weight than those of out- group folks, so learning about the racial beliefs of others has the potential to either produce or inhibit stereotype change. Racial stereotypes often persist because people assume that their stereotypic beliefs are congruent with those of others, and often overestimate the negative stereotypes that others uphold. Suggestion can undermine negative stereotypes through the presentation of countervailing consensus feedback. Withdrawing the social backing from an idea goes a long way toward undermining the power of that idea over an individual. If a colleague cracks a racist joke or an ethnic slur, call them out! That's one of the more effective ways of countering racism. 

My students and I have developed illusion-based experiments that draw, for example, on non-Black participants exchanging bodies – in other words, "body swapping" – with a Black out-group member using virtual reality. Looking at yourself in the mirror and perceiving yourself as having a different skin color through the use of virtual reality technology leads our brain to feel that we are now pigmented differently through an active, transformative experience with technology. Such procedures increase self-other merging as well as empathy, and improve intergroup relations. Experiments that rely on variables that change self-perception – for example, when participants watch their avatars, digital versions of themselves, playing tennis, and gradually getting thinner from the exertion – wield physiological effects on real people. These types of interventions represent a creative new direction to illuminate problems of racial and gender tension, and how we may go about addressing them. In this way, and others, we can apply the science of suggestion – in a way that transcends lip service and performative activism – to result in real social impact, health outcomes, and political change. We already saw that suggestion can make you lose weight and change your physiology, but it seems we are on the cusp of something bigger: extending this call to action and making the world a better place.

Dr Amir Raz is a world-renowned expert on the science of suggestion with recent positions as Canada Research Chair, Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Neurosurgery, and Psychology at McGill University, and as Founding Director of The Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences at Chapman University. Formerly at Columbia University and Cornell Medical Center, his work has been covered widely in the media and he has written over 200 peer-reviewed articles in Nature, PNAS, Neuroimage, and other leading journals. He is also a professional magician.

The Suggestible Brain: The Science and Magic of How We Make Up Our Minds by Amir Raz (£25, Hachette Go) is published on 5 December.

Photo: Cebi Abuaf