Hello and welcome to this evening's
meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California. I'm Eric Segal, chair of the club's
Personal Growth Forum and your host. We also welcome our listening audience
and we invite everyone to visit us online
at Commonwealth Club Dorjee. This evening, we start our series of talks about false narratives
which have been with us a long time. As the famous satirist
Jonathan Swift said in 1710, and I quote, Falsehood
flies in truth comes in limping after it. So when men come to be on deceived,
it is too late. The jest is over. And the tale has had its effect. Like a man
who has thought of a good repartee. When the discourse is changed. Or the company parted. The danger, of course, is that false
narratives and their cousin's conspiracy theories can damage the shared fact base
on which democracy depends whether through distorted context,
misleading editing, oversimplification, incorrect
extrapolation from a few examples
or just outright lying. The result is the same there can be
a loss of trust in institutions, tribalism, and a search for an
authoritarian leader and confusing times. Increased
stress levels and anger in society and resulting legitimized
with atomization of violence. It's therefore important that we look
at the causes of false narratives and some possible actions
we can take to decrease their power. This talk kicks off our series
with a tutorial on the psychology of false narratives and the social and technological factors
that make them so powerful today. The next talk on September
6th will be on how to deprogram a friend or family member,
and the third on September 29th will be about actions
we can take as a society and as individuals to reduce the power
of false narratives in our world. Dr. Joe Pierre is therefore with us
this evening to start us off with a solid grounding in the underlying
psychological and technical factors that are enticing
people down the path of false narratives. He's the health sciences clinical
professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David
Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and is the author of over 100
scientific papers in book chapters. He also writes the Psych
Unseen column for Psychology Today. He's almost finished writing a book
on the psychology of belief. He's the recipient of various awards,
and he's an expert witness and consultant in legal cases involving delusion
like beliefs and conspiracy theories. So welcome to the Bay Area and to the Commonwealth Club
of California, Dr. Pierre. All right. Well, thanks for having me. I actually just am in the process of
moving from Los Angeles and UCLA up here. And so I'm a new resident of the Bay Area,
and I'll be taking a position at UCSF in the coming weeks. So I'm a I'm a townee now, I guess. And I must say,
I'd never heard of the Commonwealth Club. But then when I got here and I mentioned I was giving this
talk to some friends and family, they were like, Whoa,
the Commonwealth Club. So I'm very honored to be here
at such a prestigious institution. Okay. I'm always guilty
of putting a lot of information and a lot of slides
into a relatively small amount of time. So let's get into
it. And I'm realizing now. Yeah. It's getting worse. I might have to stand a pace back. Okay. Anyway, so I'm a psychiatrist. I do mainly clinical work,
and throughout my career, I've focused on the treatment of individuals
with schizophrenia and other major mental illnesses. At the same time, one of my main interests
has been the gray area between clear psychopathology
and normal human behavior and functioning. And so I've had a longstanding interest
in what we call delusion, like beliefs, beliefs that aren't actually delusional
but bear some similarities to delusions. And so conspiracy
theories has just ended up being a very hot topic in recent years,
hasn't it? So let me just set that stage for tonight
and take us through a brief history
of recent conspiracy theory development. For most of my lifetime,
and I think probably for most of you in the audience, conspiracy
theories and so-called conspiracy theorists have really been regarded
as a kind of fringe phenomenon, complete with the stereotype of a basement dwelling,
tinfoil hat wearing individual. But it does seem like that
that has changed in the past decade, maybe even in just the 5:05 years. So I've been looking at conspiracy
theories for about the past decade, kind of just as a side interest. And then, lo and behold, in 2016,
a churchgoing father of two became convinced that there was a child
pornography ring in the basement of a D.C. pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. He was convinced that there were children
there in acute danger, and he decided to travel across state lines some 300 miles armed with a loaded AR 15 style rifle. Against the advice of his girlfriend,
I might add. And his mission was to self investigate
the situation. He got into the pizzeria. He fired some shots through a door
that supposedly led to the basement where a child were being
children were being trafficked. And he quickly discovered
that the pizzeria had neither a child pornography
ring nor a basement, for that matter. Police arrived on scene and he quickly and peacefully surrendered to police, conceding that. The intel on this wasn't 100%. Her Welsh ended up taking a plea deal, pleading
guilty to assault and a weapons charge. He was sentenced to four years in prison. He was actually recently released
and by all accounts has been living a quiet life
out of the public eye. Now, well, it might be tempting
to write Welsh off as some kind of kook. The so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory,
of course, was not his brainchild. It was something that had gone
viral on the Internet that year and had been promoted by the likes
of Alex Jones on his program Infowars. Now, a year later, we're in 2018. Now, Cleveland Cavaliers
basketball star Kyrie Irving helped to bring flat earth
conspiracy theories into the mainstream. And that same year, YouGov performed a survey
that found about 4% of the U.S. population believes that the Earth is sorry. That should yes. 4% believe that the Earth is flat. And as many as 16% lacked confidence
that the Earth is round. That same year, a documentary film
came out called Behind the Curve. I was invited to be an expert authority
on conspiracy beliefs in that film. So that guarded me. My 3 minutes of fame. And that film surprisingly turned out to be something
of a kind of sleeper hit on Netflix. I had all kinds of friends and family
calling me up, saying, I saw you on this movie, that, you know,
that I figured no one was going to see. Now, let's talk about Flat-Earthers
for a second. Let's keep in mind that flat earth beliefs are not merely
about the shape of the Earth. That by itself is not a conspiracy theory. But in order to believe
that the earth is flat, you would also have to believe that Nasa
is the most sophisticated movie studio on the planet, having faked
the moon landing and is in cahoots. Not all,
not only with the entirety of the U.S. government,
but also with every single government around the world that has a space program
or has launched satellites into orbit. So it's not just
about the shape of the earth. Now at the beginning of 2020, of course, conspiracy
theories really took off and the World Health Organization warned us at the beginning of the pandemic
that there would be an infodemic that is, this pandemic of misinformation
about COVID 19. Now, it's well known that conspiracy theories
flourish during times of societal crisis. So it's no surprise that we've seen
conspiracy theories bloom in recent years. But I don't think anyone could have
predicted just how much they've bloomed. And now that we're several years into
the pandemic, we've all really witnessed how conspiracy theories have emerged,
proliferated and coalesced . So at the beginning of the pandemic, we we heard about this theory
that the SARS-CoV-2 virus might have originated
in the Wuhan virology lab. That by itself, again,
would not be a conspiracy theory. But we quickly heard also claims that it had been deliberately synthesized
as a bioweapon, deliberately released. And there was a big cover up by China
and the World Health Organization. Other COVID related conspiracy theories have been more outlandish
in the spring of 2020. We saw an existing or preexisting
conspiracy theories about 5G. 5G networks merged with conspiracy
theories about COVID 19. And so there were claims
that the pandemic wasn't caused by a virus at all
or an infectious disease, but was, in fact, caused by electromagnetic fields
emanating from cell phone towers. And of course, COVID 19 conspiracy
theories have coalesced with existing
conspiracy theories about vaccines. So I think everyone in this room
has probably heard that perhaps COVID 19 was a plot orchestrated by the likes of Bill Gates,
perhaps in cahoots with Anthony Fauci, in order to implant microchips into people
for the purposes of tracking them, or some part of some globalist plot
that involved mass sterilization and population control. Now everybody's chuckling. But a poll from July 2021 demonstrated that belief in those conspiracy
theories was not uncommon. So 2021, the threat of coronavirus
was exaggerated for political reasons. About 40% of the US population thought
that was a definitely or probably true. 12 Weren't
sure vaccines shown to cause autism. 18% sure. 25 Not sure. And there's the one about the microchip. 20% of the population
believe that the COVID 19 vaccine was being used to microchip
the population. An additional 14% were unsure. Meanwhile, as the pandemic went
on, Pizzagate morphed into QAnon, which is I might describe
as a populist political movement that not only includes the belief
that there are satanic worshiping pedophiles
that are part of this deep state, but also that those same pedophiles
are harvesting adrina crumb from children. Hillary Clinton's drinking the adrina
chrome to make herself young and virile. There are lizard people who are operating
a shadow government across the planet. There's this thing called the storm. The storm is coming, right?
There's going to be martial law. Hillary Clinton,
all the other liberals are going to be strung up
after military tribunals and executed. Of course, the election
after that came to pass was rigged. And probably everyone
has actually heard that. There are people
who have these big rallies heralding the second coming of JFK
Jr because they think he never died. And again, this might sound crazy to you. It might not, but a 2021 poll found that about 15 to 20% of
the American population did indeed endorse some degree of belief
in some of the core tenets of Cunanan, such as the business
about the Satan worshiping pedophiles. And so as a result, mainstream
media has has declared that we're living in a golden age
of conspiracy theories. The political left has gone so far
as to claim that America is suffering from mass delusion or mass psychosis. Those on the right have claim
we're victims of something called mass formation psychosis. Now, there's a researcher,
a very well-known researcher named Joseph Luzinski
at the University of Miami. He was recently written up in this Rolling
Stone article. They described him as arguably the
foremost expert on conspiracy theories. And the guy every expert you talk
to says you need to talk to. And I think it's great that you and I have had a little bit
of communication through the years. But he takes issue with this idea that there's
a golden age of conspiracy theories. And he reminds us that
the mainstream press has been declaring it the year of the Conspiracy Theory
for decades, if not centuries. And so he performed an analysis of letters
to the editor written to The New York Times, going back to the 1800s
to see if there was any sort of if he could prove that conspiracy theory
beliefs were actually more common today than they were,
say, a century ago or 50 years ago. And what he found was,
no, that's not the case. Conspiracy
theories have always been popular. There have always been narratives that emerge from time to time,
albeit with various ebbs and flows. And likewise, research from Rand
has looked at this phenomenon called truth decay. This idea that we're dealing with now,
the idea that we're in the sort of post-truth era where people don't really agree on facts
and this sort of thing. That also is something that's ebbed
and flowed, flowed with time. So it you could argue that
it's not actually true that conspiracy theories are much more prevalent than than
they were in, you know, other times in the century. That said, I would argue
that while they might not necessarily be more prevalent,
they are more consequential. Or I guess is the title to this toxic
gets more powerful than they have been in any other point
in certainly my lifetime, and particularly because the belief in the conspiracy
theory is often tied to action. And so by way of example, of course, we talked about microchipping
and the vaccines. Clearly, it's. Been demonstrated that belief
in conspiracy theories about COVID 19 were tied to the slowness of people's
willingness to be vaccinated. So back in November of last year, when 20% of the US population
believed the thing about the microchips, only 60% of the population
had been vaccinated, with about 30% of Republicans
saying that they would not get vaccinated. As we saw in the case of Edgar
Welsh conspiracy theory, beliefs are sometimes rarely but
sometimes connected to violent behavior. And in the spring of 2020,
some 80 cell phone towers in the U.K. were set on fire
due to the belief that the 5G cell phone towers were causing COVID 19. Conspiracy theories that are focused on racial lines
also have a long history of breeding discrimination against racial groups
and inciting racial violence. Here in San Francisco, hate crimes
perpetrated against Asian-Americans. While the president
was talking about kung flu and the Wuhan virus, that sort of thing. Hate crimes increased over 5% last year, 500% last year. And so while we might not be living in a golden age of conspiracy theories based on prevalence,
I don't think it's that much of a stretch to claim that we might be living
in a dark age of conspiracy theory, belief based on the consequences and the potentia And in case you're
wondering, this is not just something that's happening here
in the United States. This is a worldwide phenomenon
going on around the world. Okay. So having set that stage, I'm going
to get into trying to give an explanation of what I think is going on
from a sort of psychological standpoint. And let's start with a definition of
just exactly what a conspiracy theory is. This is my favorite definition
of conspiracy theories stolen off Twitter by a guy named Bern Hobart. He says conspiracy theories
are a genre of science fiction in which most organizations are secretly run by
competent people pursuing definite goals. I love that
definition tongue in cheek, obviously, because it really highlights
how improbable conspiracy theories are to those of us
who aren't particularly drawn to them. Now, when I find conspiracy theories, I like to say a conspiracy theory rejects
the authoritative account of reality in favor of some plot involving
a group of people with malevolent intent that's deliberately kept secret
from the public. And we've all lived among conspiracy
theory beliefs. We've all heard of them. Many of them relate to historical events, and many of them,
particularly these days, relate to scientific topics, technology,
that sort of thing. I guess since we should get
a little audience participation, I like to use the slide
just to see which of these conspiracy theories actually is true. It's like a real like not
just a crazy thing, but actually happen. Princess Diana. Okay. Climate change is real. Right. That. Yeah. The the conspiracy theories.
The other one. That. That it's not real. Anyone else? GOP controlled, GOP controlled by Russia usually get at least ten hands
for Epstein, right? Hmm. Yeah. Epstein. Okay, yeah. You know, I heard somebody
talking about that in the in the lobby. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So first,
let me address as a psychiatrist, let me address this thing about delusions
or mass delusion. So conspiracy theories aren't delusions. Believing in conspiracy theories is not
a symptom of mental illness. There's no such thing as mass formation
psychosis, at least, you know, in psychiatry
and in a medical sense. And there are, in fact, some different clear differences between conspiracy
theory, beliefs and delusions. So delusions that we encounter in people
with mental illness are beliefs that are held with extraordinarily,
if not unassailable, high conviction. Right. They won't give up that belief
no matter what. The belief, by definition is false. The belief is idiosyncratic. Meaning, meaning it's
generally not shared with other people. It's often based on subjective experience,
like I had a dream or I had a vision, that sort of thing. And it's often self-referential. That is, the belief is about the believer. Okay. Conspiracy theories,
likewise, have are often held not always, but often held with high conviction. They're probably false, but by definition
they're not necessarily false. And as we just saw in the previous slide,
sometimes conspiracy theories do end up not end up being true, but generally
that we're talking about shared beliefs. We're not beliefs how these are not
beliefs held by a single individual. They're also based
not on subjective experience, but information
that's out there in the world. And they're typically not
self-referential beliefs, their beliefs about the world
and things that are happening in the world or other people
rather than the believer themselves. Now, the other reason why it's important
to distinguish between delusions
and conspiracy theory beliefs is that conspiracy theory
beliefs are very common. So surveys have consistently shown
about 50% of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory
that's been replicated in studies here in the US over time
as well as in other countries. And so, in fact, a 2019 poll found that about 64% of Americans
believed in at least one conspiracy theory with anywhere from 52 to 85% of countries in Europe believing
in at least one conspiracy theory. So this is normal to believe
in a conspiracy theory. This is not mental illness, or if it is,
we have to revise what we mean when we talk about mental illness. Now, what is it about conspiracy theories
that are enticing and appealing to people? One thing
is simply that they're entertaining. Dan Brown,
the author of The Da Vinci Code, wrote, Everyone loves a conspiracy theory,
so they provide narratives that are simply more interesting
and exciting than the boring old truth. So that's part of it. Now, psychologists have been doing
research over the past decade or so, really trying to identify what makes certain people more likely to
believe conspiracy theories than others. And mostly what they're doing is these associational studies
where they look at people who are right more highly on scales
that measure conspiracy theory, belief, and then they look at other what I call
psychological quirks or cognitive biases that are associated with that propensity
to believe in conspiracy theories. So some of those things that are emerged
from that kind of research include include the need for what I call the three
C's certainty, control and closure. That helps explain why conspiracy theories tend to prop up
pop up during times of crisis. There's a lot of uncertainty,
there's fear. And so conspiracy theories
provide a kind of tidy narrative, right? The death of JFK at JFK. It wasn't just a lone gunman. You know, presidents aren't
just in danger of being shot any day. This was a deliberate plot,
you know, etc., etc.. So in theory,
that might make you feel more comfortable. Although research has shown very clearly,
unsurprisingly, that people who believe in conspiracy theories don't feel safer
because of the conspiracy theory. Believe need for uniqueness is another one. That's the idea
that you might believe this because you feel you're like you're privy
to some special truth and the rest of us people, you know,
or have the wool pulled over our eyes. There are certain cognitive biases, like,
for example, hypersensitivity, hypersensitive. Agency detection refers to the belief
that everything happens for a reason or due to some higher purpose or power
rather than random events happening. There is some overlap with some mental health issues like paranoia or a construct called schizo
gets out of PE and recent works also focused on this is like a real life academic thing, something called bullshit receptivity, which is basically the propensity
to be attracted to or sort of duped by seemingly meaningful statements
that are, in fact vacuous. Deepak Chopra is often cited
as a prominent producer of that kind of. Bullshit.
No offense to any Deepak Chopra fans. And then the antithesis of that, the opposite of that is a decrease
in analytical thinking. All right. But I don't want to spend too much
actually time talking about that research. At the end of the talk,
I'll give you a reference that summarizes that, and instead I'm
going to talk about my own crazy theory. So I think that in order to understand why conspiracy beliefs are so common,
right, at 60%, 50% of the population,
we need a more normalizing model. And so the model that I have written about
in my academic work very simply just involves two main components
mistrust and misinformation. So let's start
briefly and go through mistrust. When I talk about mistrust and specifically talking about something
called epistemic mistrust. This is mistrust of knowledge
or information and specifically authoritative accounts
or conventional wisdom. And studies have shown repeatedly
that epistemic mistrust is associated with a greater propensity
to believe in conspiracy theories. Let me go back and make an important point
to when I showed you the different psychological quirks that are associated
with conspiracy theory, belief. It's not as if people who have conspiracy
theory beliefs have these things. And the rest of the people who don't,
don't. These are quantitative,
not qualitative differences. So people who have belief in conspiracy
theories might have some of these more than people who don't. But we all have needs for uniqueness and needs for control and closure
and that sort of thing. So and so likewise, we all have certain degrees
of epistemic mistrust, right? A certain amount of mistrust is healthy. But on the other side
of that sort of continuum, there might be less justifiable
or less healthy mistrust. In any case,
we live in an area of decreasing trust. This is a Gallup poll going back to the
1970s, looking at trust in mass media. Then you can see that we're pretty close
to an all time low in trusting one of the main informational sources
we have for news and facts in this country. Right. Less than 50% have good faith
that the news is fair and accurate. And probably no surprise, public trust in government
is really kind of tanked. Right. It was in the 1960s
up there in the 70 or 80%. Now, in the past decade or so,
we're hovering like in that 20% in terms of do you trust the folks in government
in Washington always or most of the time? And of course, we're living in a time
of significant political polarization that includes not only mistrust,
but a real sense of antipathy that political scientists
describe as affective polarization. Now there are a number of pathways
to this kind of epistemic mistrust. One, as I suggested
before, is more pathological. It could be just this sort of suspicious
or paranoid and mistrustful because of that. But epistemic vigilance
is also a healthy impulse, right, that we should be skeptical
and not just believe everything. Right. So this is a little bit
on the on the spectrum of more abnormal. Another very frequent cause of mistrust has to do with,
as mentioned, tribalism, racism, xenophobic attitudes and politics,
which I'll get into a little bit today. But I do want to remind everyone
that trust also has some mistrust,
rather, is sometimes earned. Right. So people mistrust
because of trust violations. Institutions of authority
sometimes don't hold up their bargain, end of the bargain. And therefore, trust is lost
because of that sort of classic example. And the conspiracy theory world is that conspiracy
theory beliefs related to HIV like that. The HIV virus was synthesized by the CIA
and deliberately put into low income populations
that those kinds of beliefs are overrepresented
in the African-American community. Then that has been linked to things
like the Tuskegee experiment, right? Where in the name of science, you know, bona fide
treatments for syphilis were withheld from African-Americans,
you know, and a whole history of that going back
since the start of the country. Okay. So I want to highlight
the mistrust doesn't imply pathology. Now science. I think there's some when we start talking
about scientific conspiracy theories or science belief beyond conflicts
of interest and real life trust violation. I also think there's a couple
other factors that are worth mentioning. One is a kind of misunderstanding
or a lack of appreciation that science is an iterative,
iterative process of research. We look again and again and things. So we all get frustrated, like, well,
I thought we were supposed to take an aspirin once a day,
and now they're saying they don't. Or, you know, HRT for postmenopausal women
like that was recommended then and now. It's not you. These people don't know what they're
talking about. Right. But that's that's science, right? That's what science is. We look at that. We collect the data. We establish, you know, what supports
or doesn't support a theory, and that may be revised
later down the line. So I think sometimes that's lost
in translation with the public as this sort of like wishy
washy scientists don't know what they're talking about
kind of thing. Likewise, there are some items
of legitimate scientific debate and without sort of infantilizing things, you know, it's a little bit like hearing
your parents argue, right, as a child. Right. If there's disagreement,
then you just experience it as chaos rather than being able to understand
that sometimes we disagree about things. And that's part of what science is. And I think also in terms of the public
perception of scientists, there is a long standing idea that scientists are elitists
who live in these ivory towers. And so in the in the midst of populism
as a political movement, populism. Right. Is this idea that, you know, the people are the core of the movement, and experts and elites
are sort of the root of all evil. And so scientists have been sort
of swept up into that as the experts. Okay. So let's assume that we talked
about mistrust. Let's go on to misinformation. The second component of my theory
and basically my idea here is once you lose trust in informational sources,
we then become vulnerable to misinformation that's out there, thereby
falling down the so-called rabbit hole. This is me quoting myself from a paper. I say, although some conspiracy
theorists may be genuinely theorizing, most are crafting a narrative based
on the synthesis of available information and might be more appropriately described
as conspiracy theorists. This next quotations from a psychologist
at the University of Michigan named Colleen Seifert. She says the problem of misinformation
in the head, where individuals struggle to maintain and consistent facts and memory, has been replaced by a problem
of misinformation in the world where inconsistent information exists across
individuals, cultures and societies. So if we want to understand
conspiracy theories in a digital age, we have to understand how we form beliefs based on information that we oftentimes
encounter online. And that starts with something I think
is now a household word confirmation bias. This is the best illustration
I've ever seen of confirmation bias. This is a comic strip. So in the first frame, it
says, I've heard rhetoric from both sides. Time to do my own research
on the real truth. It gets online and it's literally
the first link that agrees with what you already believe. Jackpot. Right. So confirmation
bias is the tendency to gravitate towards information
that supports what we already believe. And we steer away or swipe past
information that refutes what we believe. Now, in online ad environments and,
you know, this is sort of the tech world, so many of you, I'm sure, are familiar
with these concepts. There's echo chambers. There's this thing called filter bubbles
that kind of steer us to the information, the the Internet, the evil Internet
thinks it wants us to see. And the result is confirmation bias on steroids. Now, why? Right. This is the one less true right now. So why is online information so ubiquitous
and where is it coming from? Make no mistake, peddling misinformation and conspiracy
theories is a for profit industry. So there's not only misinformation,
but deliberate disinformation. The difference between now
and 20 years ago is that misinformation used to be sort of
relegated to the grocery store checkout line. Right. We recognize the Star and the Enquirer
and that sort of thing. But now in the media landscape
that we live in, reliable facts exist right alongside opinion
and not so reliable information, so that it's not really
that easy to tell the difference. And few of us
have really ever been trained like, how do you sort
out what's real, a real nut on the Internet? And so, you know, people like this, I, you know, I've had people tell me,
no, I know it's true because I saw Alex Jones say it on Infowars
as if that's like a news station. Okay, so we talk these days
about the free market of opinion. I like to call it
the flea market of opinion, right? So within the flea market of opinion,
that is today's media landscape. If you want to reach a larger audience
and if you want to get more clicks right, we operate on this sort of click based
economy online. Then it behooves you to either disseminate
or piggyback on top of material that's outrageous, salacious or false. Echoing the Jonathan Swift quote. Researchers have shown in recent years
that an online environment, social media, places like Twitter, fake news travels faster
and faster than reliable information. It is
therefore a sort of vehicle of commerce. And when I say conspiracy
theories are profitable, I don't just mean financially,
I mean politically. And so we've seen conspiracy theories
promoted in the mainstream news on both sides of the political fence. And, of course, we've also seen political leaders using conspiracy
theories to their own ends. Now recalling,
of course, that Donald Trump was largely responsible
for the birther movement in 2014. You know, several years before he took
office, the birther movement, of course, was the claim that President Obama
wasn't born in this country, didn't have a birth certificate
, etc., etc.. You may also remember that
during the 2016 campaign, he claimed that Ted Cruz's father was an associate
of Lee Harvey Oswald. And then, of course, during his presidency, he promoted the lab leak
hypothesis about COVID 19, actually saying that he had evidence
to support that that was true. And, of course, this also promoted the idea
that the 2020 election was stolen. Meanwhile, China has had countered with its own conspiracy theory
that COVID 19 actually came from the U.S. It was taken there in 2019 during the U.S. military games, and Russia had hopped on that bandwagon,
also claiming that coronavirus is all the American's fault
and there would be no we couldn't have any discussion
of a belief in misinformation if we didn't mention that Russia's
disinformation machine has been many years in the making and includes not only state
controlled media, but an army of Internet trolls and bots that proliferate
information, seemingly with the intent of fomenting discord and breeding discontent
with democracy in places like the U.S. and Europe. Okay. I think I'm pretty much on time. So I want to wrap up acknowledging that
some of the subsequent talks in these series are going to address
what to do about it. I want to make sure
I say something about that because I never like to just say,
well, here's the problem , and, you know,
I have no idea how to fix it. So based on my framework,
I want to make some comments about that. So first of all, I'll talk real briefly about what I call a prescription
for a post-truth world. And I sort of summarize this irreverently
as the holy trinity of truth detection. These are all things that we can do
as individuals. The first is maintain what we call in
psychology research intellectual humility. Basically just means acknowledging
I might be wrong or I don't know which. It just seems like we're not living in a society
where it's encouraged to ever admit that. Cognitive flexibility. This is the idea that I can change
my mind. Right? This goes back to the idea
of science, right? Here's the data. But maybe I'll modify my belief
if you give me new information. My my freshman roommate in college
went on to win the Nobel Prize, and he he and he. Adam RIESS is a physicist who discovered that the acceleration of the universe
is increasing as time goes on. And he, in an interview,
really talked about how when he first collected those data from the Hubble
telescope, it contradicted everything they believed in physics. So he immediately said, gosh,
you know, like I'm probably wrong. And let me look again and again. And like finally he said, like,
look, the data look solid. Now we have to modify our beliefs. That's not how human beings think, right? That's how scientists think. That's something when we have to train
people how to think like that. And finally, analytical thinking,
which I mentioned before, which, you know, it sounds like technical means like it
real smart and brainy or something. It doesn't mean that at all. Analytical
thinking just means slowing down thinking. This thing I just saw on the Internet.
Is it true? Maybe it's not true. Maybe before I share it with someone else
or send it or claim that it's true, I should look
what the source of information is. Maybe I should look. What's the evidence
to support that belief? And the opposite of that is intuitive
thinking. The idea. I believe this
because it feels right. Right. So what's his name? Stephen Colbert.
Colbert talked about truthiness. The idea. It's true
because it feels true to me. That's really the more intuitive, more
natural way that we think as human beings. Now, having said that, having spent
a little time talking about individuals, I think if we really want to understand
conspiracy theories, we shouldn't understand them
as individual psychopathology. We have to understand them
as a product of a sick society. So I've never been fond of this quotation
by Artie Lange, very, very countercultural, well-known
psychiatrist, psychiatrist from back in the day. But I think it's a pretty good
if we modify it a little bit, pretty good way
of summarizing conspiracy theories, a perfectly rational adjustment
to an insane world. And so in the remaining couple of minutes, let me just actually,
we're doing pretty good on time. So let me just say a little bit
about what we can do, not as individuals, but as a society and the direction
I think we might want to go. So going back to my idea of the conspiracy
theory, beliefs and really belief in all in misinformation,
not just conspiracy theories. Going back to my model
that that's rooted in mistrust. Then before we start correcting people
and saying, no, you're wrong, and here's what the evidence in this Bible
like we have to address the trust problem. We have to acknowledge
that trust has been lost. We have to think about how to get it back. And we have to do that collaboratively. And what we can't do is make this mistake
of putting the cart before the horse. That is, trustworthiness must come before
trust to earn trust from people. So if we're talking about
institutions of authority, whether it's the CDC or what have you, the way you cultivate trust is being honest, being transparent and collaborating with the public,
engaging them, letting them in the door, so to speak, giving them
a seat at the table , so to speak. So that's that's cultivating trust. Secondly, there is,
I think, a role for education. It's not certainly not as simple as just here's the facts and, you know,
people are going to gravitate to that. But we can, I think, as a society, work on trying to promote science
literacy, for example. We can try to teach people how to become better
consumers of information, whether they're encountering
that online and other or in other places. There's a great little 15 minute piece
put out by NPR back in 2019, and my child is only four years old,
but I feel like pretty soon I'm going to make him listen to this . This is like the kind of thing
we should be having our children listen to on day one,
that there's misinformation out there. And here are some tips to navigate
towards information that's reliable. I certainly didn't get
that kind of teaching in school. I don't know
if children are taught that today or not. Now there's a awesome college
curriculum called Calling Bullshit taught by two professors
at the University of Washington. The subtitle
is Data Reasoning in a Digital World. So this is a college course
teaching students how to navigate online information to decide
what's reliable or not. So which I think is great. It's it's in
the curriculum is right there online. The syllabus is right there online. But we should be starting this
in elementary school. Right. Geared down to younger people, of course. Now, the most evidence based antidote
to belief in conspiracy theories and really misinformation in general are what we call inoculation or pre
bunking instead of debunking strategies that is beating
misinformation to the punch. So if I'm a physician and I'm worried
about vaccination, I might say, you know, you might have heard this thing
about microchipping. That's not true. And here's the evidence that we know
that's not true. Right. And in fact, I just listened to a program
where a scientist did a study to try to see
if he could detect microchips just to prove that there weren't
any in there. Right. I mean, there's evidence
that there's no microchip. Of course, then it was like, well,
who was that scientist paid by, you know, and that kind of thing. Anyway, inoculation and debunking
one of the most evidence based strategies. Having said that, we're pretty bad as a society
of beating this information to the punch. We are losing that war, and misinformation
is almost always there before us. But that's a direction we can go. And finally, reducing misinformation. How do we hold media accountable? How do we think about liability? We certainly in recent years, we've seen
some of the major tech companies here in Silicon Valley
take efforts to deprioritized, if not even remove conspiracy theory
information or harmful misinformation. We've seen that with YouTube. We've seen that in Twitter. We've seen it with Facebook. Now, the effects of that kind of mitigation
are not clear. You know, does it just mean that people
will shift and leave Facebook and go to true social or whatever
that other thing was? I forget now. Well, it just emboldens conspiracy theory
believers to say, you know, you hear that all the time. Well, it was removed, so I know it's true. Right. That's
what's known as the backfire effect. And will it just worsen political polarization
and hamper discourse? We don't know. This is something I think we'll,
of course, grapple with in years to come. I'll end with this slide,
which does suggest a new precedent of liability for spreading
conspiracy theories that are harmful. And personally, I think that's a positive
step in the right direction. And I'll leave. And so I'll end on that note
and I'll take questions now. We'll have some Q&A,
but also leave you with a sort of food for thought question for you
that I don't have an answer to. Maybe people who work
in the tech industry do. How can we make truth more profitable? How can we make it more appealing sexy? How can we get people to pay for truth? So I'll end there. Thank you very much. Oh, I think
I was instructed to sit in that chair and pull the podium back to help viewers
move this. That might be a little easier. Okay. So we're now going to have some questions
from the audience and also from online. Just raise your hand when Dr. Pierre recognizes
you all run over with the microphone. And for those in the streaming session, please
just write your questions in the chat. And I'm going to start with a question from the chat
and then a follow up question for me. And then all you guys
and the people, other people on the chat. So first from the chat. Why do so many people accept
whatever they want to believe without question
and ignore any evidence? Otherwise, why do these propaganda
magic tricks work so well? Yeah. I mean, if you think about it,
it's similar to advertising, right? This is psychological manipulation,
really? Which
sounds like conspiracy theory. Right. But this is like we know
this is a human propensity that people gravitate to things that are titillating
or that they like. This has been described
some researchers have described our belief system
as a psychological immune system. We believe things
that protect a stable sense of who we are. And all too often, the way
we define who we are, identity is based on our beliefs
or our values or ideology. And so we're now in this era
where if if our beliefs are challenged,
it's taken as an existential threat. You're not just assaulting me
and my belief about the flat earth. You're attacking the essence of who I am. And so
all of these kind of cognitive biases and whatnot are designed to protect
that. Right. You've heard of things like cognitive
dissonance, motivated reasoning. These are all ways to
to preserve our sense of, you know, we're good, smart people and,
you know, we have a stable sense of self. So that's the
what the psychological machinery does. And there's actors out there
who are very good at, like, you know, tweaking that
and taking advantage of that. You know that that brings up that
what I was going to ask this, which was, you know, why are people
so reluctant to change their beliefs? It's as if they joined this tribe. Yeah. You know, for some reason, they're unhappy at home and wow,
this group accepts me, and now I'm in it. You know, I know they have a key. And so I then show up and go, Well, you're
wrong from an engineering point of view and now I'm,
you know, an idiot or whatever. And of course, I call them an idiot
and then I'm really in trouble. So why why is there this psychological need to not consider
anything else? Yeah. I mean, I'm
not going to jump on the bandwagon of blaming everything
on the Internet. Not. Not by a long shot. That said, when we are an online
environment and social media, oftentimes when we are engaging with strangers,
we're more likely to do so when we're trying to argue with people
rather than to collaborate. Right. So, you know, and in the COVID era,
there is some at least anecdotal evidence that we've stepped away from face
to face interactions. We're moving more to online interactions. We're entering, you know, where people are like,
you know, working from home here, but they're like like surfing Twitter
here. Right. And and in those environments,
we tend to argue with people versus, you know,
going to a church cookout or whatever. You might meet somebody
who's ideologically different from you, but you're probably not going to get
into it in the same way, in the same way. And part of that has to do
with the anonymity of the Internet. I call this a sort of road rage effect. It's like you're you have free rein now
since you don't actually know this other person
to jump in there and argue. Not to mention the phenomenon of,
if I'm just talking to you and we get into a debate, I might very well say, you know,
I don't know about that topic, but if I'm in the Internet, I can pretend
I do because I can like be Googling it or Wikipedia ing it as I'm having the argument,
no, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then so
I mean, a lot of it has to do with that. And there's something about arguing that for for certain people, it's
not a universal trait. But so-called trolls and people who do this
like they're this is what they do for fun. So that's part of it. Yeah. Okay. So what's the relationship between conspiracy theories and religious beliefs? Like people thinking, oh, if I eat bacon
and die, I will suffer eternal damnation. To me, that sounds like conspiracy theory,
but to others it's a religion. So, like, I guess like in your research. Yeah. Is there an overlap
with religious beliefs? Not. Not so much directly. But if we go back to some of the things
I mentioned about intuitive belief. Right. The belief is actually one of the
first papers I ever wrote as a resident, you know, 20 years ago was about
the question of faith or delusion. Right. I argued that what faith is. Maybe should be. But I think what faith is,
is an acknowledgment that I don't know what happens after we die. I don't know. Is there a supreme being? What does he look like,
he or she look like or it look like? I don't know. But I'm going to choose
to believe this thing. That's what I call faith. I'm going to choose to believe
in Christianity or Buddhism or whatever. Acknowledging that you might believe
something different. And maybe that's reality,
but I'm going to believe this thing that to me is cognitive flexibility. I can still have my faith.
I can still believe this, but I get knowledge that I might be wrong,
etc., etc.. So I think that's the sort of mentally healthy way to hold beliefs,
whether they're religious or political or otherwise. But that's not how human beings
tend to hold beliefs. We tend to do it the other way. I'm right, damn it. And I need to show you that you're wrong. In a back. I have a pretty loud voice. Mm hmm. Um, I was wondering, you know, looking at sort of a micro level
to a macro level. If you could talk a little bit about,
like, the development of. Delusional beliefs
that sort of like a Folha do versus cultism and conspiracy. Do you see that as a continuum and do
you see that dynamic similar or different? No, that's a great question and I probably
don't have enough time to answer it. And you can see that
I kind of glossed over that by in a general way saying
that delusions are usually not shared. Right. So usually if I'm treating a patient
and he has a delusion, there aren't ten other people going. No, I think he's right to the way
you see with conspiracy theory beliefs. But as you pointed out,
sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we do see fully right
a craziness of two insanity of two where two people sort of share
the same belief. Now, traditionally in psychiatry,
the way that it was explained is that there's
usually a power differential and that the delusional individual
has power over this person and somehow convinces the other person. And so I saw a case of this years ago. A mother and son where the mother had
schizophrenia was delusional. Teenage son came in and we evaluated. He had all sorts of very odd beliefs. And we asked him, Well,
how did you come up with this? Mom told me she'd been telling me this. So the traditional view is
that person might be delusional, but this person isn't. So it's kind of a little bit of steering away
from the idea of a true group delusion. Like, not everyone is, like, insane. That's usually that one person. Now in a cult that's or so-called cult,
I don't really like that term, but in a in that kind of environment
where there's the charismatic individual and the flock of followers,
then you do get into that dynamic and you can see
where people who have beliefs that are, you know, outlandish, perhaps delusional,
perhaps diligent, deliberately false and outlandish, have the ability to,
you know, spread that to other people. Certainly that's something to that we have to acknowledge when we talk
about these large groups, group beliefs. Anyway, I could go into more detail,
but this is a great question. I think I should probably go poolside. Okay. Back Middleton. I would like to add something to your
for further reading. I finished reading Being Wrong Adventures
in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz,
and she goes into great detail about how extremely, extraordinarily
difficult it is for human beings to admit they're an error, even when it dawns
on them that, Hey, I'm wrong. It is so extremely difficult. So if you're going to be proselytizing
with a conspiracy, folks read that book. Great. Thank you. Over here. I was wondering if you're familiar
with the Academy of Ideas and under there they have a section in pursuit of liberty
and they speak about mass psychosis. And I was reading how much you thought this could be a seminal influence
to leading to a mass psychosis in society that could be detrimental,
such as January 6th or such? Well, again, I would steer away from
the idea that this is psychosis. And as a psychiatrist,
I'm sort of protective of that word. This is not a mental illness phenomenon,
and this isn't novel. This is the first time we've seen a society in and in a mass movement
gravitate towards false beliefs. Right. That's a political
that's a social phenomenon. So I get persnickety about using the word
psychosis about, you know, mass delusion. This is not mental illness. This isn't like, oh, my God, 60% of the population
has delusional disorder or schizophrenia. That's not what it is. That said, there's a great deal
to be learned about the social dynamics that govern belief vis a vis cults, vis a vis political movements,
vis a vis social movements. I mean, that's really,
I think, where the money is at. Not so much,
you know, shrinks me now. Yes. What sorts of individual and societal actions do you think we can take
to fight misinformation? And over what time scale
would you say that we can make a real shift in our current misinformation
epidemic? Well, I must say, I'm not an optimist by nature. I tend to be a pessimist. And I also along this line of,
you know, acknowledging that I don't know. I pretty much never make predictions. So I have no idea what's going to happen. I don't know if,
you know, we're all going to burn and climate change in the next ten years
or what. So, I don't know. I think there's things we can do. I think there's directions we can move. And I go back to the slide I ended with
I think the real thing that we haven't quite tapped into is
how can we make, you know, like there's an old Superman slogan like Truth, Justice
and the American Way. How can we make truth
actually some universal objective truth? How can we make that the thing
that we all herald and, you know, honor because that's been lost. How do we do that? I'm not really sure. You know, I'm going to put in a plug
for that September 29th talk where we're going to talk
about things that we can do as a society. Okay. Next over here, I'm going to run across. Oh, sorry. Yeah,
I got to make him exercise. Yeah. Good. Ooh, over here. I'm from Australia and by about January this year
we had about 95% of our adult population vaccinated, double vaccine against COVID
1990 5% of adults. And I'm just thinking about that
and wondering how much do you think
this phenomenon is uniquely American and potent and also whether it has to do
with the American education system. Mm, yeah. Uh, what's the expression? You know, shots fired? No, I mean, I will definitely say
that I think education is a problem. Now, I do not, by
any stretch of the imagination, think
that this is a uniquely American problem, as we saw in terms of conspiracy theory
beliefs across Europe. There are plenty of places where vaccination rates are as bad,
if not worse, than they are in the U.S. So not a uniquely American phenomenon. That said, particularly
around the political things that I hinted at, that's part of what's going on here
in America. Populism, which is a worldwide
phenomenon, has taken root here in the United States. And I didn't get into it. But many of these conspiracy theory
beliefs are partizan beliefs. Right.
We talk about climate change, right? That in general is a conservative
conspiracy theory. And you could say, well,
that's tied to big oil. And, you know, they're giving money to politicians. That's right. So that's certainly part of the story. Now, I won't tell you exactly where I moved to,
but it's north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Right. Which historically was like the anti-vax mecca of the world. And now and I looked at this
before I decided to move. There has one of the best vaccination
rates in California. So going back to what you said about,
is there something to be done? Yeah. And it's not just Marin County
or the United States. Like there's something else going on that I think we do have the power to influence. I'm here. Oh yeah. I'm curious about how much you think
the proliferation of conspiracy theories is just based off of
about available availability heuristics. Just the idea that the easier
it is for belief to recall, the more likely
we are to recall that belief and then pretty much agree with it. I'm wondering,
with the increase of the Internet and things that make particular beliefs
more available. Right. How much of this is just that versus
more difficult to diagnose issues there? Great question. So like I said, there's a kind of long
laundry list of cognitive quirks. Various heuristics like availability,
heuristic are among those. I think the other one that's relevant is something called the illusory
truth effect, which is kind of related. It's the idea that if you insist
famous quotation from 80 years ago, if you hear a lie often enough,
you come to believe it. That's true. Psychologically, that's been demonstrated. So even the way
sometimes the media might cover something, even if they say that it's false,
if it's there, as you said, availability, the information becomes in our public consciousness, like we've all heard
the thing about microchips. So once that's out there,
like maybe it's true. You know, and one thing I didn't mention
is that when we have beliefs, it's usually not 100% or zero. Right?
I believe that's 100% or I believe it 0%. It's like, well, maybe it's true. Right. And that's the other thing. So when you hear something
like the microchips out there, I mean, I haven't actually looked at the data
and the studies and the analysis. So could it be true? Like, I wouldn't have intellectual
humility if I said it's 100% false. So when misinformation is out there
and it's in the sort of public consciousness, it has a way of fueling
false belief or at least doubt. And that's why you look at the flat earth
thing that's like 4% believe it's flat, but 16% aren't really sure because like
there's all these other people telling me it's not flat and, you know, maybe it's
not round, you know, maybe they're right. Yes. There seems to be a lot of blame on the supply side of misinformation,
including media and the Internet. I wonder if there's some discussion
or research about on the demand side where maybe inherently there is people
who are craving for misinformation and the supply side
is just catering for the demand. How much of that can be done
through education? How much of that can be corrected over
time? Yeah, that ties into my mistrust,
mistrust and misinformation model. So the misinformation
model is on the supply side, but also on the consumer side when we talk about confirmation bias
and that and that sort of thing. So certainly there's efforts
to become better consumers of information. There's campaigns in other countries
and think, including Australia, like think before you click or think before you share and really try
to hammer that idea in into people. So that's on the consumer side about how can we be better
consumers of this technology. Then the mistrust side
really is all on the consumer side. It's like, why is there this thirst
for these counter narratives? And that,
as I addressed, goes into trust, mistrust. And how do we then cultivate a society
that's more trusting of leadership, of media
and that kind of thing? And again, back to my final question of
how do we make truth from a supply side? How do we make that more appealing? Because right now
it's too easy to make money, you know,
proliferating bullshit, basically. Right. How do we how do we tweak that? I think it can be done. You know, going back to truth, justice and the American way,
I mean, there's ways to do it. And I just haven't seen a lot of movement
in that direction. Okay. Yes. A quick question. Are there tipping points? So, for instance, let's say a former
president gets arrested. It is. But seriously, is there a tipping point
where people get more extreme and go into it or less extreme
and sort of a fever is broken about, you know, election
being stolen, for instance? Yeah, great question. And the answer is
that it goes in both directions. Right. So there's this phenomenon called
cognitive dissonance. This is the idea that I have this belief
and then I encounter it could be, you know, information that that cunanan's a great example. Right. It's like Trump is going
to reclaim the office on March six and there's going to be martial law. And then March six goes past
and then you're like, well, wait a minute. I've spent my past two years
investing in Cunanan. I'm following the Q Drops, I'm deciphering
the breadcrumbs, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you know anything about Cunanan and now
like, oops, the prophecy didn't come true. So some of the people indeed
and people have been written up in the media who have experienced this go,
you know what? This was all bullshit. I'm out of here. Like no more of this. You know, I've wasted my life. But some people. And it's proportional to how much energy
you've invested into it. The way you resolve cognitive dissonance
back to this idea of the psychological immune system
isn't to say, Oops, I was an idiot and I've been wasting my life
for two years. You double down right
and you move the goalposts. Okay. Not March six,
but maybe July or not. July six. Maybe December. Right. And it goes on and on and on
and on and on. So it of depends on the individual in part
how much they've invested in part perhaps some other features
of that person, whether it's the need for uniqueness part
and how, how meaningful you become in that movement,
what it does for you, and acknowledging that some of the people
are making their livelihoods from that sort of thing
even . Q And on, right. Q And on. T-shirts and, you know, selling
stuff online, like you're not just going to walk away from that
if that's been your livelihood. So. Yes. This is an honor, Serena Williams,
for going back and forth on the court. Okay. So if I'm in a conversation with. An opposing point of view, a very strident opposing view. When are facts? Facts and and and the truth when they're telling me that's not fact
and that's not true. Yeah. I mean, that that's why people claim that we're
now living in a post-truth world because there is no agreement
about facts and truth, you know, and the president, alternative truth,
you know, that whole thing. Former president, I should say so. So that's sort of the dilemma
that we're dealing with. And a lot of that has to deal back
with this misinformation idea that we now have a country
that at the very least relies
on two different sources of information if we want to break it along
political lines. But it's really like 100 different sources
of information. Right. And that's where the problem of truth
and facts come in. It's like, well,
you have your facts and I have my facts. So if you're asking, how do you overcome,
that does sound like we'll have some subsequent
speakers getting into that. I think the advice that I usually give, you know,
I was interviewed by a bunch of media, you know, during the Q and on phenomenon
about like how do you interact with family members
who have like gone down the rabbit hole and that kind of thing? And my advice usually for family members,
assuming you're not a spouse, is living with someone 24, seven
is then not get into it. Come over for Thanksgiving dinner. We're not going to talk about that thing. Sorry, we can talk about that
maybe another time. But like,
let's focus on some other activity rather than getting into that belief.
I understand what you believe. Okay, let's just save that
for another time. I mean, I think that's the healthy way
we have to sort of re cultivate our relationships with people rather
than focusing in on the belief thing. And just sometimes you got to dial
that off, assuming you're able to, you know, depending on the relationship they've got. Maybe they. So would you kick them out of it? Now they're back in trouble again. So if you build a support outside,
they won't have to cling so hard. One of the things
we're going to talk about in the next. Okay. Time for one or two more. Let's see. I just wanted to mention what I've seen is the profitability of the people who seem to be promoting a lot of these conspiracy, disinformation campaigns, propaganda, profitability,
that some of the main players is. Enormous, for sure. Enormous. So it seems, from what I see,
that they don't have a lot of regard for the people who that who are following
them as to the information correctness accuracy, for sure, of the information
that they're passing on. So I think that's an important point
to mention. I don't know if it's important
to when you're when you're reading talking to somebody who's opposite of the facts
of what you know, who you're talking to, say, hey,
you know, how much money these people. Right. I mean, you know, and what they're doing. And when you see something
like the Sandy Hook, you know, situation in the trial,
which just happened and you see what Alex Jones did through
all those years, it just, you know, so there's that aspect,
the profitability of what they're doing. Yeah, I refer to this
as the disinformation food chain. And you have these apex predators
at the top of the disinformation. Disinformation again,
means deliberate misinformation, right? That they're purposely top down, spread,
spreading that information. The funny irony
about conspiracy theory beliefs is that oftentimes conspiracy theory
believers say like follow the money. Right. It's always like, oh, you can't believe
the Fauci because he, you know, worked on a drug study 30 years ago,
you know, that kind of thing. Right. The conflict of interest. But rarely do they look at the follow
the money of the conspiracy theory, belief. And there's many, many anecdotes
and stories of whether it's in the anti-vaxx world
or what have you of the money that's actually funding that belief
and for what purpose. So that's where I referred to
is sometimes as jujitsu, persuasion. This idea that, like,
as you're suggesting, maybe we can, you know, use the thing you're telling me to do,
which is follow the money and kind of flip that back on you. Does it work? You know, it just it kind of depends
because there's this automatic. You can just write that office. Oh, I don't care. I'm
just going to pay attention to this thing. So, again, I think the money is it's really less about trying
to convince people that they're wrong. You know, in terms of interpersonal relationships,
I think we have to abandon that hope. And sometimes I have this memory
of when I was in high school, we had this kind of mandatory
kind of debate class. And it had to do with, you know, in
American history or some such thing. And the assignment was always
you had to defend this side of the debate and argue your point. And the other side of the class
had to debate this one. And you were basically graded
on your ability to defend that belief, not to listen to the other person and say,
you know, gosh, maybe you're right. And maybe like there is a middle ground
or a middle truth and, you know, that kind of thing. So I think that, again, is kind of lost
when we when we talk about how we interact with people. There is this kind of like, how do I you know,
the question shouldn't be, how do I convince the other person
that they're wrong? I think that's not the direction
that we should go when we're talking about people who are our friends or loved ones
and that kind of thing. I have. One. One last question I want to take
from the viewers and then we'll wind up. How does modern day marketing and media compel us to believe? You know, what tactics are they using? You know, make us want things
that that we don't really want. Yeah, well,
I did write a blog post where I said that, you know, I become a conspiracy theory
believer myself because, you know, it came after Cambridge Analytica and ,
you know, the Facebook scandal and that sort of thing. I mean, as I mentioned before,
this is like the psychology of advertising, which has been going on
for centuries, if not millennia. Certainly heightened now in the way
we are able to reach people information. It's all based on
exploiting our little foibles, our cognitive biases and our foibles. So that's a huge
part of what's going on now. And, you know, I don't know what to say in terms of the answer,
whether it's, you know, unplug from Facebook
or that kind of thing. But this is a big part of what's going on. It's like people are tweaking
these propensities for us. You know, I spend time on Twitter
probably more than I should, in part because I sort of enjoy it, in part
because I it's sort of my lab in a way. Like, I see what goes on there,
but I myself find myself, you know, whether it's getting into it
with someone or like, you know, those kind of forces are indeed
very powerful when they can steer us in that direction. The computer science part of me, you know,
when you are on Facebook and you answer those little surveys for you, Facebook
can see what you're interested in, right? They know this. And so they're going to feed
you more stuff in that general area because their goal
is to keep you on Facebook. And so now you see a little bit from this other group,
you know, you join a a new moms group. And then you eventually get fed something about, you know, vaccines
because those two groups overlap. You know,
this is all without looking at it. We just notice that these people tend
to populate both groups. So let's show him something. Let's
show her something from the vaccine group. So now you're in the vaccine group
because, gee, you clicked on a few things. And so now Facebook knows that you'll look at this group,
so they'll show you more things. Oh, now that you're in the vaccine group. Let's move to this other group
that has overlap. And the next thing you know,
you're down into the tunnel. But it's based on all this information
that's been accumulated. And that's not a conspiracy theory. Right. There's a great summation of what
you just said in a New York Times series that ran a year
or so ago called Down the Rabbit Hole. You can listen to it
on. Audio is fantastic. And it sort of takes you through stories
of how people did exactly that. We started off, you know,
supporting Obama and Clinton and somehow step by step
found them further afield of that, you know, on YouTube and launching videos
and that kind of thing. Okay. Well. We're running a bit over. So our gratitude to Dr. Joe Pierre for being with us today. And we're also grateful to our audience here as well
as to those listening on the recording. And so now this meeting
of the Commonwealth Club of California commemorating its 119th year
of enlightened discussion, is adjourned.
