To Reclaim a Shared Reality We Need Storytellers, Not fact-checkers

The antidote to a lie is the truth. The cure for fabricated news stories is fact-checking. Right?

Of course not. If that were true, all the fact checking done over the past five years would have effectively established a shared truth, and fabricated news stories would spread only until debunked. Instead, they continue to spread like wildfire, on topics ranging from American election legitimacy to vaccine safety. Combatting this spread of lies and establishing a shared reality requires storytelling, not just fact checking. Stories without facts can change minds, but facts without stories cannot.

Fact-checking alone doesn’t help combat fabricated news because belief in a story is often based on an emotional connection, not an endorsement of the underlying facts, or lack thereof. Especially during times of high anxiety, stress, or uncertainty, a reader can feel emotionally vulnerable and assess a story’s truthfulness not on logical coherence but on emotional resonance.  A study in 2020 highlights this point by testing readers ability to tell the accuracy of news headlines. Half the headlines were true, half were false, and half favored Democratic politics, while half favored Republican politics. Before being tested, participants ranked their emotional state from low to high. When compared to the least emotional participants, the most emotional were twice as likely to believe the false headlines. Emotional states are elevated from the Great Recession, increasingly frequent and harsh weather patterns, unexpected election outcomes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the related economic retraction. It’s no wonder that when NewGuard, a website dedicated to tracking misinformation, studied engagement (likes, shares, comments) with news content on Facebook and Twitter from the top 100 U.S. news sources, they found that engagement with fabricated news rose sharply in 2020 compared to 2019, and was higher in the run up to the 2020 election than the 2016 election.

In the United States, evidence suggests some of this emotional vulnerability also stems from a perceived threat to one’s identity. Pew Research found that while a majority of Americans believe that diversity is essential to America as nation, between 2018-2019 there was a 13-percentage point increase in Republicans who agree that being open to others puts America at “risk [of] losing [its] identity as a nation”. This trend existed even before 2019, as evidenced by a survey by PPR Institute that found participants who indicated they felt  “like a stranger in their own land” were 3.5 times more likely to vote for Trump. Republicans’ perceived threat to identity helps explain why fabricated news writers in the run up to the 2016 election focused on pro-Trump, not pro-Hillary content. Investigative reporter Craig Silverman interviewed 140 fake news site creators and concluded that “the stuff that was anti-Trump was just not getting the same traction [as pro-Trump content]”. Founder of Disinfomedia, Jestin Coler, agrees, saying that his company “tried to write fake news for liberals- but they just never take the bait”. Neither political affiliation nor intelligence drives vulnerability to believing fabricated news stories, rather, differences between perceived threat to one’s identity drive belief in fabricated stories that reinforce and reassure one’s identity.

All of us, to some degree, analyze stories through the lens of identity protective cognition. Cultural cognition expert Dan M. Kanah explains identity protective cognition simply: people tend to believe information that reflects the beliefs and ideals of their group. Economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow designed a study after the 2016 election that found that the stronger one’s partisan identity, the more likely they were to believe false headlines that supported their political view point. In this study, people guessed the accuracy of a list of headlines which were either factual, false, or placebos (designed for this study). Democrats were more likely than Republicans to correctly identify headlines as true/false; however, both were more likely than undecided voters to believe placebo headlines that appealed to their identities.  Lacking a strong ideological contention, undecided voters better deciphered truth from fiction because they were not framed to believe stories that reinforced this aspect of their identity.

The connection between ideology and belief in fabricated news is especially worrisome given that undecided voters are hard to come by. Instead, partisan identity is quickly becoming as important, if not more important, than other identities, such as religion, race, or culture. A study co-authored by Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood of Stanford University and Dartmouth College, respectively, found that Americans’ (among other nationalities) primary identity was not their race or religion, but rather their affiliation to a political party. The study had 4,000 participants from Belgium, Spain, the UK, and the US play a trust game. In the game, player 1 is incentivized to share as much money as possible with player 2, in hopes of player 2 reciprocating at the end of the game by sharing the money. The study concluded that political identity was a primary driver of level of trust between players, trumping the effects of differences in race or religion, for example.

President of the Pew Research Center, Michael Dimock, also suggests that partisan identity is increasingly important in America writing that “it’s not at all clear that Americans are further apart from each other than we’ve been in the past…. What’s unique about this moment – and particularly acute in America- is that these divisions have collapsed onto a singular axis [political affiliation]”. As long as identities are strongly tied to politics, and as more and more beliefs are defined by one’s political affiliation, there will be a healthy opportunity for fabricated news creators to leverage these divides to push conspiracies through believable, but false, stories.

Finding a “solution” to fabricated news will not be fast or straightforward. Combatting misinformation will require robust educational campaigns to help readers identify fake news, as well as an approach to regulating online platforms that upholds American rights to free speech. It will also require an acknowledgement that the solution will not be primarily fact based. We must all remember that Aristotle outlined three keys to persuasive writing: ethos (credibility), pathos (emotional appeal), and logos (logical appeal). While all are important, it’s clear that pathos plays an outsized role during times of high emotional stress, such as today.  If we are going to reestablish a shared American narrative, a shared truth, a shared reality, we have to start with stories, not with facts.