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When presented with a new piece of information, about something you do not know about, what do you do? A perfectly rational being ought to suspend judgement and investigate further before deciding if the information is true or false. This was how 17th century French philosopher René Descartes thought our mental systems worked. But is this really how we deal with new information? If you find yourself nodding, think again.
Another philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, thought that we believed first and verified later, if at all. Decades of contemporary research has proven him right, showing that we start by believing that the information is true. Often, we stop there. Only sometimes do we go further to verify the information. After all, who has the time or energy to go and check every single thing, especially in this age of information overload?
There are good reasons why we are so trusting. Morally, we are taught that lying is wrong. This results in a society where there is a tendency and an expectation for people to communicate truthfully.
Biologically, it has been argued that our mental systems evolved to accept statements to be true. Imagine a stone-age couple. The woman warns her man that she sees a lion. If he is going to pause to check if she was telling the truth, she might soon have to find a new husband. Whether she was right or wrong, and it was simply a friendly deer instead of a human-eating lion, running and hiding would be the safer choice.
However, our caveman intuitions do not serve us so well nowadays. Just ask the seven people in Singapore cheated out of S$78,000 (€52,000) in just three months last year through Bitcoin investment scams.
Such scams employed a simple strategy. Using online ads posing as genuine news articles, they featured famous Singaporeans such as the prime minster, his wife, other ministers, actors, actresses and billionaires. These personalities supposedly gave ringing endorsements to such investment schemes. The ads even go so far as to pretend to be an actual page from leading Singapore newspaper The Straits Times, complete with masthead and logo.
The scammers leveraged the credibility of The Straits Times, the politicians and the celebrities to lure their victims into the lion’s den. Mix that with our tendency to first believe what we read or hear, and you get a profitable scam that continues unabated today, one year after it was first reported. Fake news and similar kinds of fraudulent behaviour remain a scourge.
In case you think you would personally never fall for fake news, consider whether you have ever forwarded messages that you received from friends or family on your phone or email, sharing an interesting but somewhat dubious piece of news. Perhaps not, but have you simply read and believed them without checking further?
Or have you ever heard or even just overheard someone talking about how great or bad a product, a book or a movie was, and it affected your decision to buy or watch it? Come to think of it, how many of us believed in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy?
Since such a tendency to believe seems boiled into our psychology, what can we do? Recent psychological research on how we can combat our gullibility suggests that we gird ourselves with more knowledge – if the fake news contradicts our existing knowledge, we will tend to question it more.
Learning more is certainly a noble pursuit, but clearly there is a limit to our personal knowledge. We may look towards sources of collective knowledge, such as the work of fact-checkers, fake-news-debunkers and other reliable information resources, but that will never be enough also. We need to think for ourselves. We need to be more sceptical of what we are told and be more distrustful of the information we receive.
But then again, more distrust is not altogether a good thing. A less trusting society can result in a less knowledgeable one, since we may become less certain even of basic facts. It can even lead to a mistrust of authorities. As a society, we will need to strike the right balance and figure out which sources of information we can trust. The traditional news media is well-positioned, with its high reporting and journalistic standards, to step up and fulfil this need. We, as consumers of information, also need to do our part – we need to know more, think harder, and pause before forwarding that message of juicy but questionable “news” that we just received on our phone.
References:
Gilbert, Daniel T. “How Mental Systems Believe.” American Psychologist, 1991, 13.
Mayo, Ruth. “Knowledge and Distrust May Go a Long Way in the Battle With Disinformation: Mental Processes of Spontaneous Disbelief.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 28, no. 4 (August 2019): 409–14. doi: 10.1177/0963721419847998.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/bitcoin-investment-scam-78000-li-nanxing-tharman-11008096
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/fake-bitcoin-website-strikes-again-this-time-quoting-tharman
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