Can Curiosity Kill the Lie?
Over the past week (6/21 to 6/28), approximately 2.5 million people were exposed to climate misinformation on Twitter.
Over the past week (6/21 to 6/28), approximately 2.5 million people were exposed to climate misinformation on Twitter. The misinformation moving this week settled into three familiar tracks: general climate denial, opposition to the Green New Deal, and purported hypocrisy on the part of climate activists. Unsurprisingly, members of the extreme right wing, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, are tying the bipartisan infrastructure bill currently moving through Congress to the Green New Deal, even though – news flash, for the zillionth time! – it’s not.
Other content moving out there last week included a piece in the Daily Wire stating that old electric car batteries and solar panels are somehow more damaging to the environment than using fossil fuels -- they’re not. In addition, Fox News’ Sean Hannity managed to wrap the Green New Deal into his attack on The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman (see the Times’ defense of Haberman here). There was also a Zero Hedge piece on the defeat of a climate change referendum in Switzerland titled “Swiss Reject Climate Change With Zoomers And Millennials Leading The Way,” which supposedly lends support to the idea that young people do not actually support real action on climate change. This is a theme that has started to emerge over the last few months, and is, as you would expect, completely false.
As we’ve mentioned before, one way to stop people from sharing misinformation is to remind them that accuracy matters, which is what we do at triplecheck. Another way is to encourage people’s natural curiosity. In a recent podcast, economist Tim Harford said that curiosity was “key” to avoid spreading misleading statistics and other kinds of misinformation. People who believe they are subject matter experts and know everything they need to know about a particular subject are sometimes the most likely to be fooled by misleading statistics. Harford noted that “it’s never been easier to fool yourself. It’s never been easier to put yourself into a bubble…[but it’s never been easier] to get really high quality help – to ask smart questions and go deep.”
There’s a lot of information out there about how to encourage curiosity in children. It’s tougher to find information about how to encourage curiosity in adults. How can we make the psychological reward for asking tough questions as powerful as the reward people get from feeling that they’ve got the answer?
See you next week!