
Susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than partisan bias - ohjeez
https://www.psypost.org/2018/07/susceptibility-fake-news-driven-lazy-thinking-partisan-bias-51707
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xevb3k
It’s not just an issue with fake news. People believe things, both true and
false without applying critical thinking.

I recently saw someone objecting to climate change being characterized as a
“belief” [1] as it’s a scientific fact. Unfortunately, even with this being
the case a large number of people believe in climate change because of their
own inherent biases. It’s absolutely possible to hold a belief that is true
for the wrong reasons. And in the long term, unless the root causes are
addressed equally harmful.

[1] the context was 60% or Americans believing in climate change.

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vixen99
Be nice if people using the term climate change were forced to define exactly
what they mean by it instead of throwing it around like some kind of magical
incantation.

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tnzn
"Politically neutral" what ?

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Semirhage
As far as I cannot tell neither are really the driving factor, rather it’s a
desire to believe. People who want to believe in X look for stories which
confirm X. X can be UFO’s, or Muslim rape gangs, the blood libel, or FEMA
detention camps... it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the story
reinforces the desired beliefs, then many people won’t think too hard about
it, they’ll spread it to like-minded people, and reinforce the belief. The
thinking looks lazy, and the person may look partisan, but that isn’t the
active ingredient. You see this pattern in everyone from free energy cranks,
through anti-vaxxers and hyper-partisan ideologues, to people who
simultaneously believe that Princess Diana was murdered, and that she faked
her own death and is still alive. Likewise people who believed that Osama Bin
Laden was dead before the SEAL raid that killed him, were most likely to
believe that he wasn’t killed and is still alive!

[https://www.livescience.com/18171-contradicting-
conspiracy-t...](https://www.livescience.com/18171-contradicting-conspiracy-
theories-mistrust.html)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/)

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235449075_Dead_and_...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235449075_Dead_and_Alive_Beliefs_in_Contradictory_Conspiracy_Theories)

It’s a breakdown in how humans think and believe, it’s just that. It doesn’t
dominate everyone’s thinking, but it dominates enough people to skew elections
and online conversations.

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TangoTrotFox
I think this is the evident reason. Anybody who's capable of any degree of
self reflection can also probably see the exact problem in themselves. When I
see a headline that confirms my own biases, I tend to be vastly less critical
of it than one that challenges them. I have to consciously force myself to
remain critical of things that say what I want to see, and that's very
difficult - and something that the vast majority of people clearly do not do.
And I think something that's really driving this problem is the deterioration
of the media. When articles are increasingly regularly 'factually challenged'
it let's people more easily kick in the cognitive dissonance and dismiss
everything that opposes their own biases as fake.

And while you're giving some fairly radical examples, this applies to very
simple and practical issues. Without stirring the hornet's nest with precise
examples, it's safe to say that the reporting on most of any political issue
is rarely even remotely impartial. So what is true and what is not? What we
tend to believe, one way or the other, is what we want to believe - and you
can certainly find some source or another stating it's true. Pair that with
social media where people surround themselves with people who all mostly think
the same way, and thus share a constant slew of sources all saying what these
people collectively want to hear, and it leads sort of parallel realities
where two large groups of people might see the color green, but one
collectively convinces themselves it's blue, and the other that it's red.

~~~
tnzn
"Anybody who's capable of any degree of self reflection can also probably see
the exact problem in themselves. "

It has less to do with an ABILITY of self reflection than with a POSTURE to
take in context. Look around you, you'll most probably meet many people who
are ABLE to think "critically" yet fall for fake news and hoaxes. Also,
there's the fact that it's easier to detect false information on questions you
are familiar with.

~~~
jakeogh
"it's easier to detect false information on questions you are familiar with"

That's so important.

The old "modern" news has _long_ assumed a local minimum of giving the
remaining audience strong opinions on things they have not personally checked.
Distilled; it's a final pointless outburst of pretend-informed righteousness.

If I'm waiting somewhere watching the network that shall not be named it's an
odd mix of funny and terrifying; the stuff they implicitly assume their
readers do not know is so trivial... at some point you must assume it's not an
accident that they also pretend not to know the unmentioned basic info.

I could link a wall of specifics, but why? Most people don't respond to being
told they are wrong (myself in 04' included).

Deliberately tangential example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R3BN4T6XMw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R3BN4T6XMw)

