The Post-Truth Problem
"A crowd is only as smart as any given individual if that individual crafts the beliefs of the crowd"
Our morals and ideologies are the building blocks for shared identities. They are uniquely human concepts that have driven progress towards common goals. Today, they feel far from it. But partisan conflict and identity politics are not new, nor are they inherently irrational. So, what is it about today’s moral climate that seems so explosive? In our hyper-connected, digitalized world, a Victorian-era essay provides surprisingly relevant guidance.
William Clifford (1877) opens his inquiry, The Ethics of Belief, with an image of a shipowner about to send his emigrant-ship to sea. Prior to raising anchor, the shipowner inspects the vessel’s aging construction and makes note of possible repairs, nonchalantly casting doubts on the seaworthiness of the ship and suggesting a thorough refurbishment could be in order. Then again, the shipowner deliberates to himself, the ship has weathered many journeys and overhauling it would mean delaying the many hopeful families due to board; not to mention the significant financial cost of repairs. After mulling over his inconvenient thoughts and arriving at a sincere conclusion that the vessel would carry the families unfailingly, the shipowner sends the emigrant-ship on its way with peace-of-mind. The ship then goes on to sink, taking its passengers and their hopes down with it.
Clifford explains that, unquestionably, the shipowner is to blame for the deaths of the emigrant families. Despite the sincerity of his belief in the ship’s sturdiness, he must be held accountable. More contentiously, Clifford also suggests that the shipowner should have faced sentencing regardless of the ultimate fate of the journey, because “he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him” (Clifford, 1877, p. 1). This moral obligation to hold only those beliefs for which you have ample evidence is known as epistemic responsibility.
Fast-forward to the present day, it is implied that our society is devoid of epistemic responsibility, and that the degradation of social capital — shared ideals of goodwill, trust, and civic engagement — is the result of irrational beliefs and alternative epistemologies being acted out (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017). In our post-truth age, we are all Clifford’s shipowner, interpreting the evidence before our eyes as it best suits us.
References
Clifford, W. K. (1877). The Ethics of Belief. Contemporary Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199253722.003.0008
Hahn, U., Hansen, J. U., & Olsson, E. J. (2018). Truth tracking performance of social networks: how connectivity and clustering can make groups less competent. Synthese, 1–31.
Hahn, U., Sydow, M. Von, & Merdes, C. (2018). How Communication Can Make Voters Choose Less Well. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, (May).
Kahan, D. M. (2016). The politically motivated reasoning paradigm. Emerging Trends in Social & Behavioral Sciences, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118900772
Kunda, Z. (1990). The Case for Motivated Reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., & Cook, J. (2017). Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and Coping with the “Post-Truth” Era. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(4), 353–369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.07.008
Macdougall, R. (1906). On secondary bias in objective judgments. Psychological Review, 13(2), 97–120. https://doi.org/https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0072010
Seifert, C. M. (2017). The Distributed Influence of Misinformation. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(4), 397–400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.09.003
Shearer, E. (2018). Social media outpaces print newspapers in the U.S. as a news source. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/10/social-media-outpaces-print-newspapers-in-the-u-s-as-a-news-source/
About the Author
Jason Burton
Jason is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Cognition, Computation & Modelling (CCCM) at Birkbeck, University of London. Before joining Birkbeck, he earned an MSc in Organisational Psychiatry & Psychology from King’s College London and held a research position at Copenhagen Business School’s Department of Digitalization. His research seeks to further our understandings of how cognitive processes intersect with the post-truth environment, ultimately revolving around the topic of human rationality. Outside of academia, Jason works with HATCH Analytics as a research psychologist to apply behavioural insights in the workplace.
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