Arguing with facts against polemics and false claims

There is a lot of public discussion these days over pseudoscience, political conspiracy theories, crackpot history, malicious propgaganda and what the best ways to combat them may be.

One of the surprising findings of some studies is that in some fashion, provide correct information to debunk the false claims can have the effect of reinforcing belief in the false claim.

That has always struck me as intuitively wrong. I even suspect it's sometimes offered in politics in the US as a way to get Democrats to not bother to debunk the constant stream of misinformation and falsehood against Democrats from FOX News, Breitbart, Infowars, and various other rightwing media, including alt-right sources and foreign nations' propaganda operations.

Four scholars from the University of Illinois and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania published their results on their own study of that problem, Debunking: A Meta-Analysis of the Psychological Efficacy of Messages Countering Misinformation Psychological Science 28:11 (2017).

They found that in some cases, the reverse-debunking effect occurs, in which hearing the correct information can indeed reinforce the false belief. But it doesn't have to.

They offer the following suggestions for avoiding that result in the sense of a communication or linguistic strategy:

Recommendation 1: reduce the generation of arguments in line with the misinformation.

Recommendation 2: create conditions that facilitate scrutiny and counterarguing of misinformation.

Recommendation 3: correct misinformation with new detailed information but keep expectations low.

The first of the recommendations is the most troubling one. Because it suggests that the more detailed the argument against a set of misinformation is, the more likely the exchange is to strengthen the false belief. But this doesn't apply to casually held beliefs. As they explain, "The false beliefs on which we focus here occur when the audience initially believes misinformation and that misinformation persists or continues to exert psychological influence after it has been rebutted." If people hold a belief strongly and have thought and talked about the false enough have adduced multiple reasons for believing it, giving them a lot of arguments against it can kick off this proces: "when the elaboration process organizes, updates, and integrates elements of information, generating explanations in line with the initial misinformation, this process may create a network of confirming causal accounts about the misinformation in memory."

In other words, the harder people think about beliefs with which they had established an identification, the harder it may be for them to change their minds.

The second recommendations gets to the issue of framing, which has been much discussed in American politics, particularly i response to the work and recommendations of George Lakoff. Aside from providing an appropriate context for discussion, it also means providing not just facts rebutting the bad information but a new framework for understanding the matter, a different perspective.

Following from that, the third recommendation emphasizes providing the correct information as distinct from just refuting the bad. With a reminder that it won't always work! But other times it will.

The Annenberg Center provides a summary of the article here, "Debunking study suggests ways to counter misinformation and correct 'fake news'." ScienceDaily09/09/2017.

In the context of the immigration issue which is roiling the politics of the United States and the European Union, another implication of the first recommendation is important.

Speaking of this persistence-of-mistinformation effect, Stephan Lewandowsky notes, "one of the ways to get around that is to tell people not just that something is false, but tell them what's true. Alternative information makes it much easier to update your memory." (Susannah Locke interview, How to debunk false beliefs without having it backfire Vox 04/25/2018)

Lewandowsky also notes that the setting of a classroom-type situation is different from that in which political information and disinformation is often conveyed:

If you have a situation like a classroom where people are forced to sit down and pay attention, that's when more information is helpful. There's a lot of evidence of this in educational psychology.

Now the problem is in a sort of casual situation, people listening to the radio or having a superficial conversation — that's where the information deficit model doesn't apply. And superficially just throwing information at people probably will make them tune out. So you've got to be careful when you're talking about public discourse, TV, radio, media.

I've been thinking I should devote more posts to factual information on the immgration issue. Hearing the reality behind a strongly held belief that is associated with a person's political or cultural identity won't necessarily change their mind. But reality does matter!

The Austrian broadcaster ORF 2 program Im Zentrum carried a report last night (30.09.2018) on Politik und Pressefreiheit - Der Kampf um Macht und Wahrheit (video available at the link through October 7) on the status of press freedom in Austria today. It included Walter Rosenkranz, the head of the parliamentary club for the far-right FPÖ, which is the junior partner in the current national government; Beate Meinl-Reisinger, head of the NEOS party which holds seats in Parliament; Georg Wailand, the deputy chief editor of Austria's most widely circulated paper Kronen Zeitung; Armin Thurnher, publisher of the influential Vienna weekly Falter; and, Reinhard Kreissl, a sociologist of crime.

Rosenkranz defended efforts by the FPÖ-led Interior Ministry to encourage police to publicize details about the backgrounds of people suspected in violent crimes. Which is consistent with anti-immigrant propaganda efforts to stigmatize immigrants as more likely to commit crimes than native Austrians, which the crime statistics consistently show is not the case. There was some discussion about crime statistics and how to interpret them, including discussion about how the crime rate has been declining in Austria. Rosenkranz used the discussion to try to associate rape in particular with immigrants. Meinl-Reisinge challenged him into admitting that the most common national origin of the foreign rapists is Germany. The xenophobes preferred image of foreign rapists is that of an Afghan, Arab, or African perpetrator. This is similar to Donald Trump's anti-Latino propaganda.

My impression was that the discussion got the point across to anyone in the audience actually paying attention that the impression left by xenophobic agitators that Austrians are increasingly in danger of violent crime and it is the fault of immigrants, both of which ideas are false. On the other hand, Rosenkranz did what he could to highlight the image of foreign rapists, which presumably also reinforced that narrative in some viewers' minds. Debunking is complicated.

Walter Hämmerle reports in Die Schwarzmaler Wiener Zeitung 29.09.2018 that according to the FPÖ-led Interior Ministry's information, there were 510 thousand criminal complaints in Austria in 2017, which "is the lowest number in ten years." He observes that the numbers that are there include some serious concerns, "but taken in themselves provide no rational justification for the general pessimism" and general security in Austria.