Podcast | Ready To Be Strong Ep.19

Show Links
Outraged by Kurt Gray: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714327/outraged-by-kurt-gray/

Transcript

Scroll down for the transcript:

Tania: Welcome to Ready to be Strong. I’m Tania Israel. 

Elizabeth: And I’m Elizabeth Scharf.

Tania : Together, we’re broadening our minds, opening our hearts

Elizabeth: And strengthening connections to face the challenges of living in a divided world. In this episode we’re going to be talking about misinformation. A topic that’s been on my mind probably for the past I don’t know maybe six years, eight years and I think Tania the reason it’s been on my mind is because it brings me back to the fourth grade me

when I learned about footnotes and how important it is to look at the sources of information via footnotes and basically to make sure that the sources are reliable. Do you remember that class?

Tania: Yeah, this is so great. So first of all, you are not the only person thinking about misinformation. And second of all, yes, I remember learning about this. So I’m going to give an example of childhood writings. When I was growing up, I really wanted to have a cat, but I was not allowed to have a cat because my dad was allergic. And so all of my desire to have a cat was driven into every single assignment that I had in school growing up. So there’s a whole series of papers about cats. And the one that I’m just going to mention now is the one from, I believe it was second grade when I wrote a paper called Cats and every sentence started with word cats and it was all factual information about cats. Cats have four legs and cats have fur and like all these things about cats. And then at the very end, I say, because cats are hunted for their meat in some places, someday they may become extinct. The end. 

Elizabeth: What?

Tania: And all my teacher wrote was good paragraphs and I got a check plus and I’m like, how did my teacher not say, cite source? I mean, where are you coming to this wild conclusion that cats are gonna become extinct? So yes, that was before we learned about footnotes and how important it was to cite our sources.

Elizabeth: Right, and back in, let’s say, 1980-something, the source of most of my information, if I was writing something, would be the encyclopedias And so that was known to be fact. And from there, we learned about other sources, whether it’s primary sources, secondary sources, when you went to the library, primary being interviews. And that’s just the way we were taught from what I remember. And I’ve kept that in my head since then. And for some reason, once we had the internet and all the information out there, we’ve forgotten that rule of looking at the source, making sure it’s a reliable one.

And that has really bothered me because some very smart, let’s say family members have sent me information over the past eight years. And I look at the source and I say to myself, how does my family member think that this is a reliable source? And I guess that’s why I wanted to talk about misinformation. We collectively are forgetting that third grade, fourth grade rule of checking the sources and making sure that they’re reliable sources.

Tania: Yeah, I totally get that. People are very concerned about this I know during the pandemic, there was a lot of concern about people are not getting vaccinated because there’s misinformation that the vaccine is going to cause them harm or whatever. were all these things about mask wearing. So misinformation has become a very important thing from a public health perspective, from how people are making their decisions about who to vote for perspective. And it sounds like you’re concerned that there are people on what you might think of as the other side of the political spectrum who are being maybe fed misinformation and relying on that without checking it.

Elizabeth: Absolutely, and there’s so many different sources these days that used to be the reliable Encyclopedia or the New York Times or another reliable newspaper, maybe the BBC as a news source, but there’s so many new sources of information. And so now I’m kind of wondering how do you make sure that the source of your information is a reliable one?

Tania: Yeah. And I think, we used to all be focused more on everybody’s watching a single source of news. So we all have sort of a common understanding. And now there’s so much out there on the Internet. And journalism does have some criteria so that we can rely on that more but when just everybody’s putting their own ideas and stuff out there it’s a lot harder to assess. You know it’s interesting though? When I read the book about Hamilton that the musicals based on, one of the things that stood out to me was that there were newspapers and things at the time that were reporting all kinds of wild stuff. I mean there was misinformation from the beginning of our country, certainly if not before then. So we’ve had that kind of thing around for a long time. And then I feel like journalism sort of became more professionalized and then we could rely on it more maybe. And then that’s kind of disintegrated in the last while.

Elizabeth: Yes, I think you mentioned something about the standards for journalists. And I think one of the criteria is fact checking. And so I wonder if that is actually explained how much fact checking a source does before they put out a story. But I would think that would be one of the requirements for finding a reliable source is fact checking. Do you remember when Breitbart

came on the scene and I got so many articles about from Breitbart via family members, friends, and this was before it was notoriously Breitbart and I just kept on mulling over is this fact, is this fiction and I had no way of figuring that out and I wonder if actually news sources say how much fact-checking they do now. Or if there’s even a third party actually rates different sources of news and information that has like a, if that doesn’t exist, it should exist. Like a zero to 100 continuum of how reliable is this source. 

Tania: Sure. So one of the things that I notice is that when I do this work on political division, people want me to talk about misinformation all the time. Like, misinformation is a really hot issue. Everybody’s talking about it. There’s a lot of concern about it. People are like, how do we deal with misinformation? So I feel like I have to address it some. But mostly what I do is to say,

misinformation’s a thing and yes, it can be problematic. And it’s not necessarily as directly related to people’s behaviors as we might imagine it to be. And also we have this confirmation bias where we’re all drawn to the information that supports what we already believe to be true and we tend to disregard or dismiss information that conflicts with our existing beliefs.

And the idea of misinformation fits so nicely with that cognitive bias. Because then we’re looking at information, we’re like, yes, I am right. Everything that I’m looking at is telling me that I’m right. And then somebody is saying, but hey, here’s what I believe, and here’s the information I’m going with, you’re like, well, I’ve never heard of that. That’s ridiculous. And we haven’t been exposed to that information sometimes. Sometimes because it’s incorrect. But sometimes, because it’s not within our sphere of supporting what we already believe to be true. So there’s this piece of it I’m always like, yes, we need to do misinformation, but I worry that we’re overemphasizing that as the source of the problem in division.

Elizabeth: Right, so you’re saying that it’s, yes, misinformation and filtered information. Is almost the larger problem.

Tania: Yeah, I sort of think about the narratives that the information is embedded in journalism even is not you know when you open up a newspaper it’s not like like a list of bullet points of factual information. It’s embedded within stories and it needs to be I was talking to a journalist who was like yes what we were taught in journalism school was to take a perspective.

They’re not just trying to list out factual information. Frankly, we probably wouldn’t pay as much attention to that if they did. I’m going to give an example of something here when it comes to vaccines, let’s go back to, say, January 2022. Vaccines had been out for about a year. And the story that was everywhere was about the difference between Democrats and Republicans in terms of vaccination rates. So is that something you had heard? 

Elizabeth: Yes. 

Tania: So that was accurate. 90 % of Democrats had received at least one dose of the vaccine compared to 61 % of Republicans. So definitely a disparity there. And that’s what all the stories were about, they were about Democrats and Republicans are dealing with this really differently. What these stories were not reporting was that 86 % of American adults had gotten at least one dose of the vaccine. 86 % of Americans.

This nobody was emphasizing the story. I found it buried in one or two stories about vaccination rates, but for the most part, it was just not being covered at all. So the narrative was that Democrats and Republicans are really different, that Democrats are almost all getting vaccinated and Republicans at a much lower extent, even though it was legit, a majority of Republicans were still getting vaccinated.

And all these stories that I was seeing were about vaccine hesitancy or the anti-vaxxers, and that this is why Republicans aren’t getting vaccinated. So, first of all, almost all Americans did the same thing. Okay? And can you imagine what would have happened if that’s the story we were hearing that almost all Americans are doing the same thing. We are protecting ourselves and each other’s health in a crisis, you can count on Americans to act as one, to act in unison. And that the people who weren’t getting vaccinated, a small percentage of them were anti-vaxxers, but a very small percentage. That was not primarily what was driving things. And the story got really skewed in the media and in our minds. Now, was it misinformation? No. People were, you know, journalists were reporting accurately that there was this disparity between Democrats and Republicans in vaccination rates. None of that was misinformation, but it was embedded within a very specific narrative that is very different from the narrative that I am promoting, which is that, look at how Americans really acted together, which is such a different story, also embedded in absolutely accurate information.

Elizabeth: Wow, that’s fascinating. What a different story that would have told and maybe change the way people were feeling about the country and Americans in such an isolating time. I wish I had known that. I would have screamed it from the hilltop.

Tania: It’s also really hard to get traction on something like that. I wrote a piece, it’s out there, but it’s not consistent with the way people were thinking about things. People were thinking that we’re really divided and we’re different and there are these differences in vaccination rates. And so when you put something out there that says, actually, 86 % of Americans have gotten vaccinated.

Again, we ignore or dismiss information that contrasts with our existing beliefs, even if it’s accurate.

Elizabeth: Right. Did you get that information from the CDC? 

Tania: Yep. 

Elizabeth: So this makes me think about all the federal public health information that had been out there and is no longer going to be out there providing these types of facts. And now we’re going to become even more reliant on news providing the quote facts, but within their own narrative.

Tania: Sure and even when the facts are available. Everything’s being filtered through our own minds and our biases when I think about what’s dividing us. I don’t think it’s primarily misinformation. Misinformation does play a role and I will admit that something I’ve done at times because I get so frustrated about how everybody’s focused only on misinformation and not thinking about things within these narratives. I have sometimes maybe downplayed the role of misinformation. I was on a panel at the American Psychological Association And they talked about misinformation, but they also sort of said, it’s not as directly related to behavior as we might think. They were super nuanced about it, which I think was great because they’re researchers. So then they brought me in as the hopeful closer. So I came in, and I talked about how really there’s so much going on with our minds that’s not about people trying to deceive us. I did draw on one study that shows that it’s a very small percentage of the media that we’re exposed to is actually misinformation or disinformation. But that was based on a pretty narrow definition of misinformation. And there’s been some stuff that’s come out since then that said yeah It’s actually more of a problem than that. And to be fair, I don’t want to completely dismiss misinformation so misinformation is a thing and it can be problematic and I don’t think it deserves the weight that we are putting on it. And I also think that when we think about misinformation as being the primary problem, it’s allowing us to just embed our thinking more in our cognitive biases to separate ourselves out more from other people who we see as being misinformed. And we think we are unbiased and well informed. And anyway, so I get concerned about over focusing on misinformation.

Elizabeth: Now I’m going to push back on you a little bit. And that is because we have a president and his right-hand henchmen who are both actually really using misinformation as a weapon. And so I think people listen to them so much, and they do have such misinformation, whether it’s about aid we give and agencies and numbers being completely off. I do hear you that it has not just been about misinformation, but if I had a graph, I would say misinformation is going up because of the two people that have a big loud speaker right now and are really blasting out misinformation.

Tania: And my thing is not just focusing on the two people at the top who have the loudspeaker, but saying, what are we each doing in this realm? I hear you saying, people are listening to them and they have a big microphone. And yes, that is an issue. I’m also interested in, so if we’re more on the left, which we are, legitimately, what is it that we haven’t been sorting out as well as we could have?

So In 2019, there was this Facebook story that kept popping up in my feed about this woman, Tanya McDowell, a black woman. She had gone to prison for lying about where she lived so that her child could attend a better school. And her situation was juxtaposed with Felicity Huffman and all these other celebrities who had paid to get their kids into prestigious schools. You remember this time period and this kind of story?

Elizabeth: Varsity Blues or something like that. Yes.

Tania: Absolutely. And so my friends were posting this story to demonstrate this lack of parody in terms of how a poor black woman was treated in comparison to a wealthy, famous and wealthy famous white parents. So I was like, yes, that seems incredibly biased and unfair. This is terrible. And everybody’s posting this with comments that are expressing outrage about the unfairness.

But then somebody posted one comment that just said, that’s not the whole story. And I was like, it’s not? And I got curious about that. So I went on to Snopes, which is one of my favorite ways of checking information, because they’ll sort of do that kind of check that you’re asking for. You’re like, wouldn’t it be great if somebody were doing this? OK, well, Snopes analyzed the situation.

So McDowell was a mother who was sentenced to five years for a combination of crimes, including the one about the school district. But there were also several more serious crimes and it wasn’t her first offense. Well, that information was certainly not in the post that I was seeing that were expressing all this outrage and these disparities. I’m not going to say that erases the fact that there are inequities in our system.

But when we are putting information out there that is incomplete, that fits just within this narrative, it’s really easy for people on the other side if I was like, but wait a minute, there’s this woman who’s gone to prison and blah, blah. And they’d be like, yeah, but here’s all the other stuff that you don’t know. I then sound really misinformed and uninformed. So yes, this is happening now in certain ways.

But it happens to us too is I think something important for us to recognize.

Elizabeth: Oh sure, I definitely cherry picked. We would call it cherry picking information that fits my own headline. I am definitely guilty of that. And so one of the things that I try to do is to get different sources of information to try to figure out what is the complete picture of information. For example, yes, I listen to Rachel Maddow sometimes, but I also tune into Fox News sometimes and I try to keep it on as long as I can. I shake my head most of the time, but I feel like that gives me a complete picture of what all the information is out there. And my dad used to do the same thing. Now, what was shocking to me is that he would end up landing on the conservative side, even with more information, which is a little bit even more disappointing if he didn’t  actually reach out and get more information, right? Is there something that you do to make sure that you have the complete picture?

Tania: So two sources that I really like are Allsides and Ground News. These are websites that look at how a story is being covered from multiple perspectives. And they’ll say, here’s from more conservative resources and here’s from more liberal sources. I really appreciate that, because frankly, watching the news from either end, which is like Rachel Maddow and Fox News, I don’t find as helpful for doing that, partially because both of those sources are really emotionally activating and they are really drilling into those places where we already are on the political spectrum. Rachel Maddow is going to activate my “oh yeah, exactly”. So of course I will take her information more at face value than frankly I will when I look at the stuff from Fox News, or even though I’m looking at that, I am gonna be criticizing it in my mind as I’m watching it, rather than having it just kind of feed in more to the assumptions that I already have.

Elizabeth: Right, so you’re challenging what is going into your ears at the time. 

Tania: Mm-hmm. 

Elizabeth:  Okay. 

Tania: Mm-hmm. 

Elizabeth: I mean, that makes sense. I have not heard of all sides. I like that. It makes me think about the origin of people’s different narratives because I think about how our minds are shaped so much when we’re younger and how can we go to the same schools, sit in the same fifth grade classroom, sit in the same college classroom and walk out of those doors at the end of it all and people have different narratives in their head. How does that happen? Do you know how happens?

Tania: Well, how does it happen for you that you have the worldview that you have?

Elizabeth: Well, I think that I have been very shaped by the teachers, the information that was given to me during school, but there has to be something more, which is probably the way, obviously family, but then also the way I’ve experienced life and the shoes that I’ve walked in, the places I’ve been, but it puzzles me growing up in the family I did that I am pretty much the only liberal person in my immediate family. And we’ve walked in pretty similar shoes, at least with my siblings. I’m really starting to think about how do we get these narratives in our head? Because we all do it. We all cherry pick to fit that narrative. 

And how can we have different narratives but also have a bridge between those narratives? Almost like a rainbow bridge where we can connect with other people even though we have different narratives.

Tania: Right. Well, I actually think that other people are such an incredible resource because if I’m exposed to only my narratives or the information that supports my narratives, then if there’s someone else who has a different narrative, I’m like, tell me. I really want to know. And if I can approach that with that genuine curiosity of what am I missing here? Then that just will lead to a better connection than if I’m just about reinforcing my own view and wanting to proselytize into other people, then that’s not going to lead to a very good conversation. But my gosh, this person can give me insight into a perspective I don’t already have. Wow, what a gift they can give.

Elizabeth: What percentage of the population do you think feels that same way?

Tania: Well, certainly everybody has read my book.

Elizabeth: Because I think it’s a great perspective. I really do. And if more people thought that way, we’d probably be a lot more united than divided.

Tania: Yeah, there absolutely are people who are already there, and I hear from them all the time. I mean, I am part of the bridging movement. So there is a bridging movement with hundreds of organizations that are working on bridging divides, and then lots of people who attend their programming and follow them. so this is already happening, but we very rarely hear about it. Even when we look at the news on political division, what we hear about is how families are falling apart and all of the conflict that’s going on around it. What we don’t hear enough about is bridging activities and how people are actually doing this and working it out. A majority of people have changed the way they are using social media because of the ways that it is causing more conflict.

We don’t hear about that enough. We hear about the dangers of social media, which are many and big, but people are actually using their agency to make a difference there. I always want to see more news stories about this, but here’s the problem. Most people, that’s not the news they want to hear. People like to hear about conflict and they don’t like to hear as much about positive things that are happening.

Elizabeth: Right, we need more bridging stories out there. And the way I like to bridge is by coming up with something that we can all agree on, safety or good health. And then having the other person agree that, this is important, this is absolutely important. And I love the question that you often say is, what led you to that? What leads you to the point of view you have on safety?  

And if we can understand where they’re coming from, what shoes they’ve walked in, what experiences they’ve had over their lifetime, then maybe we can understand a little better of their point of view, but agree overall on safety matters. Good health matters.

Tania: Absolutely, I think it gives us a place to be able to identify a common concern even if we come out at different ways and come to different conclusions. And I think that’s a thing we have to accept the different conclusions that someone else is going to come to. This is where our narratives really make a difference because just giving somebody additional information about something about safety and statistics and things like that they’re going to hear it within the narrative that they already have. And so if we look at the small slices of information that we are exposed to and the narratives that that’s embedded within. So it’s not just that we’re exposed to different information, but we are drawn to different narratives and those narratives have different information that supports them. And a lot of that information is either true or has a kernel of truth in it, I’ll say.

Elizabeth: Right.

Tania: So this probably won’t be the last time that I mentioned this book that I’m reading right now. It’s called Outraged and it’s by Kurt Gray, who’s a social psychologist, and he does a fantastic job unpacking some of that question you’ve been asking about, how is it that we get to these different places and how how is it that we’re so different, but also that we have some common values?

One of the things that he talks about is that we all have a morality based on harm, like trying to prevent harm to ourselves and people who we see as vulnerable. But we have different ideas about who is vulnerable and who’s vulnerable to mistreatment or unfairness and our differences in our morality are based on that. So we all have the similarity that we’re all focused on harm, but some people are focused on harm to people who have experienced historical injustices. And some people say, well, yeah, those people can experience harm, but also people who are in authority can experience harm. And this is where you get, some people are focused on Black Lives Matter. Some people are focused on Blue Lives Matter because they’re like, police officers legit, are way more likely to die on the job than most other professions. And they’re out there supporting our public safety every day. And it’s clear why you can be concerned about that. Well, it’s also really clear why you can be concerned about Black Lives Matter and how, if you look at the statistics about police use of force against people of color, black and brown people in particular, much higher than against other groups. So there is data that supports either one of those perspectives, right? None of that’s misinformation, but really different narratives that we’re focused on.

Elizabeth: And I think being concerned about one group does not negate the concern of the other group too. And I think that’s it’s almost like pitting people against each other that I really don’t like. And we’ve seen this in different justice movements, etc. where they’re competing for a little bit of spotlight or resources, whatever it may be. And I think that maybe the best thing we can do is think of abundance and commonality.

Tania: Can you say more about that?

Elizabeth: So when I think of abundance I think about all the resources that we have in the world and it just doesn’t have to go to one group and it can be shared among many. We’re not, those who have been marginalized don’t have to fight for one piece of pie. There are more pieces of pie out there. So we don’t have to pit ourselves against one another in fact, it would be more effective to actually come together and form that bridge so we can be more powerful together.

Tania: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that the more connected we are, then the less vulnerable we are to people trying to control us, whether it’s from within our country or outside of our country. And so that’s where I feel like, wow, I really want to try to help us hold our democracy together and help Americans build those bridges. And here’s the other thing.

You know, when we hear from Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter folks, that’s actually a small minority of people who are affiliated with either one of those perspectives. That most people, frankly, are not really paying attention to any of this. And that they are frustrated with the people on either extreme and especially the vitriol around it. So I think that’s something important for us to notice or something. I’ve been trying to notice, is how emotionally activating is this source that I’m paying attention to? And I’m like, okay, I wanna know more about this topic, but let me see if I can find it from somebody who’s coming at it from a perspective where I don’t feel like they’re just trying to rile me up.

Elizabeth: Right this is a great example of this is fact both sides can make different arguments based on their narrative.

Tania: Yeah. Interesting. Where are you right now with this conversation? Because you came in, you’ve been wanting to talk about this information since we started hosting this together. Where are you with it now?

Elizabeth: Yeah, it’s funny. I have been thinking about misinformation so much, as I said in the beginning, because I think that third grade, fourth grade classroom rule of thumb has been lost as we enter the digital world. But I’ve ended up in a different place. Yes, that still matters. But the filtered cherry picking of facts and putting them into the narratives that we have in our brains is an even bigger issue now for me. And so I’m going to start probing for all the information, not just the cherries that I like, in order to have a more rounded and fuller grasp of all the facts. And I will still probably have my narrative, of course, but maybe that narrative can be a bit broader and more connecting.

Tania: Well, my work here is done.

Elizabeth: I feel like I was in the front row and the only student in your classroom today.

Tania: Well, I really appreciate that you came with this topic because so many people are really focused on this. And I think, again, it’s not that it’s that misinformation isn’t important. I think it is important. But I think that when we see it as the only thing and we’re not looking at that nuance in our own narratives, we’re using it as kind of a cudgel against other people. We’re saying, misinformation that the other side is taking in and they’re misinformed and uninformed and I know everything and I’m objective, is kind of how it plays into our biases. So I just appreciate the idea of taking a more nuanced approach. We talked about things like all sides and ground news as ways of seeing where the information that we’re getting fits in, noticing what our narratives are. Using Snopes maybe, when we need to check and also recognizing that yeah, we may have accurate information, other people may have accurate information, but there’s a bigger narrative that it’s within and we can know more about that narrative by being genuinely curious about where other people are coming from and seeing them as a resource. I love it.

Elizabeth: Absolutely.

Tania: I’m Tania Israel, professor, psychologist, and author of Facing the Fracture.

Elizabeth: And I’m Elizabeth Scharf, social entrepreneur and urgent optimist. 

Tania: Make your choice.

Elizabeth: Are you ready to be strong?