Memories Are Made Of Fake News

Michael Hedges August 29, 2019 - Follow on Twitter

The fake news phenomenon has set off alarm bells from the rational side of life. With its reality-busting siblings misinformation, disinformation and propaganda it worries, with justification, those concerned by the spectre of mind control by autocrats and other charlatans. Given pervasive digital platforms fake news traffickers have learned that minds are easily manipulated. It seems George Orwell and Aldous Huxley called it right.

Social science has added its heft to the understanding of fake news (et.al.) and its effects through peer-reviewed research into cognitive and motivational psychology. Many of the findings are depressing. Occasionally, remedies - beyond flagging content or shutting off mobile phones - are prescribed.

Within this is the well-studied phenomenon of bad memories. Psychologists have repeatedly found that people do not have infallible memories, particularly with distance from the event in question. “Memory is a reconstructive process which changes over time to incorporate new information, and integrate with our understanding of both the situation and our wider worldview,” wrote cognitive psychologist Frederic Bartlett in 1932, cited by medium.com (August 16). Things get blurry.

Repeated exposure to fake news can create whole new memories with misinformation, then, taken for true, wrote Central Washington University (US) associate professor Danielle Polage in the 2012 paper Making Up History: False Memories of Fake News Stories, published in Europe’s Journal of Psychology. Participants in that study were exposed to false news stories, presented as true news, according to the abstract. After a five-week delay they and a control group not exposed to the fake news were asked to rate the stories on truthfulness and plausibility. The fake news stories were rated more truthful by those previously exposed who also tended to believe the fake news stories came from real news sources.

Notable current events also grab the attention of academics. Last year’s referendum on abortion rights in Ireland was the subject of considerable campaign advertising as well as a plethora of false claims. A study principally conducted by University College Cork (IE) psychology professor Dr. Gillian Murphy presented news stories, some true and some fake, to survey subjects in the weeks ahead of the referendum. They were asked if they remembered the stories, how they felt about them and where they had heard them. The subjects were also asked about voting intention and given a standard cognitive ability test. After seeing the series of posters subjects were told that some might be false.

Both those favoring repeal of Ireland’s abortion law and those against were equally likely to have remembered the true campaign messages. Those intending to vote against the law’s repeal were far more likely to remember or believe the false ones. “This demonstrates the ease with which we can plant these entirely fabricated memories, despite this voter suspicion and even despite an explicit warning that they may have been shown fake news," said Dr. Murphy.

“Participants who scored lower on the cognitive test were no more prone to forming false memories than were higher scorers, but low scorers were more likely to remember false stories that aligned with their opinions,” said the paper. “This finding suggests that people with higher cognitive ability may be more likely to question their personal biases and their news sources.”

"In highly emotional, partisan political contests, such as the 2020 US Presidential election, voters may 'remember' entirely fabricated news stories," said Dr. Murphy. "In particular, they are likely to 'remember' scandals that reflect poorly on the opposing candidate.”

"People will act on their fake memories, and it is often hard to convince them that fake news is fake," wrote University of California Irvine memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, who participated in the study. "With the growing ability to make news incredibly convincing, how are we going to help people avoid being misled?”

To that end, a Yale University (US) study, published last year, found that people most likely to believe fake news are immune, in a sense, to reality. These folks are least likely to be open-minded or willing to “reflect on intuitions and gut feelings,” said principal researcher Michael Bronstein.

“Delusion-prone individuals may be more likely to accept even delusion-irrelevant implausible ideas because of their tendency to engage in less analytic and less actively open-minded thinking,” said the study abstract. “Although delusion-prone individuals were no more likely to believe true news headlines, they displayed an increased belief in fake news headlines, which often feature implausible content.” Tabloid editors have known this forever.

“Dogmatic individuals and religious fundamentalists were also more likely to believe false (but not true) news, and that these relationships may be fully explained by analytic cognitive style,” the report concluded. “Our findings suggest that existing interventions that increase analytic and actively open-minded thinking might be leveraged to help reduce belief in fake news.”

Efforts to foil the fake news traffickers, usually limited to online platforms, by adding markers to the content or replacing the false information with fact-checked sources may or may not succeed. Some people, noted above, are simply resistant. Cambridge University (UK) psychology researchers Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden came up with a different idea, published earlier this summer.

They designed a video game in which the players are fake news producers using the basic tools of misinformation campaigns. As players create fake news articles within the game they become “inoculated,” resistant to real misinformation. “People’s ability to spot and resist misinformation improves after gameplay, irrespective of education, age, political ideology, and cognitive style,” they wrote.

“When you go to a magic show you may be duped by the trick because you don't know how it works," said Dr. van der Linden to CNN Business (July 4). "But once you know how it works you won't be fooled again."

References

• Bartlett, Frederic. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge University Press (1932)
• Bronstein, Michael with Gordon Pennycook and Adam Bearc Belief in Fake News is Associated with Delusionality, Dogmatism, Religious Fundamentalism, and Reduced Analytic Thinking. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (March 2019)
• Murphy, Gillian with Elizabeth Loftus, Rebecca Hofstein Grady. False Memories for Fake News During Ireland’s Abortion Referendum Psychological Science. (August 2019)
• Polage, Danielle. Making Up History: False Memories of Fake News Stories. Europe’s Journal of Psychology (May 2012)
• Roozenbeek, Jon with with Sander van der Linden. Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation Palgrave Communications (June 2019)

See also...

• Hot Topics - Fake News