Facts and Myths about Misperceptions

Facts and Myths about Misperceptions. Brendan Nyhan. Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 34, Number 3—Summer 2020—Pages 220–236. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.34.3.220

In politics, the sources of—and belief in—dubious claims that meet this standard often divide along partisan lines. On the issue of health care, for instance, Politifact selected Palin’s “death panel” claim as the “Lie of the Year” in 2009 and Barack Obama’s oft-repeated claim that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” under the Affordable Care Act as the “Lie of the Year” in 2013...

Conclusion
Many responses to the problem of misinformation unfortunately threaten to
undermine or limit free speech in democratic societies. For example, critics have
called on Facebook to ban ads from political candidates that are deemed false, which
would introduce a centralized constraint on a core form of political speech that is
absent in other media like television. Since 2016, a number of countries around the
world have gone even further in using fines or even criminal penalties to try to limit
misinformation. For example, Kenya enacted legislation making the publication of
false information a crime, a step that the Committee to Project Journalists said will
criminalize free speech (Malalo and Mohammed 2018).

Calls for such draconian interventions are commonly fueled by a moral panic
over claims that “fake news” has created a supposedly “post-truth” era. These claims
falsely suggest an earlier fictitious golden age in which political debate was based on
facts and truth. In reality, false information, misperceptions, and conspiracy theories
are general features of human society. For instance, belief that John F. Kennedy was
killed in a conspiracy were already widespread by the late 1960s and 1970s (Bowman
and Rugg 2013). Hofstadter (1964) goes further, showing that a “paranoid style” of
conspiratorial thinking recurs in American political culture going back to the country’s founding. Moreover, exposure to the sorts of untrustworthy websites that are
often called “fake news” was actually quite limited for most Americans during the
2016 campaign—far less than media accounts suggest (Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler
2020). In general, no systematic evidence exists to demonstrate that the prevalence
of misperceptions today (while worrisome) is worse than in the past.

Even exposure to the ill-defined term “fake news” and claims about its
prevalence can be harmful. In an experimental study among respondents from
Mechanical Turk, Van Duyn, and Collier (2019) find that when people are exposed
to tweets containing the term “fake news,” they become less able to discern real
from fraudulent news stories. Similarly, Clayton et al. (2019) find that participants
from Mechanical Turk who are exposed to a general warning about the prevalence
of misleading information on social media then tend to rate headlines from both
legitimate and untrustworthy news sources as less accurate, suggesting that the
warning causes an indiscriminate form of skepticism.
Any evidence-based response to the problem of misperceptions must thus
begin with an effort to counter misinformation about the problem itself. Only then
can we design interventions that are proportional to the severity of the problem and
consistent with the values of a democratic society.