Brian’s Reviews > Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life > Status Update

without the training that they need to carefully evaluate sources, to identify and check their own biases, and to separate opinion and fact, students matriculating out of schools that teach kindergarten through 12th grade (K–12)—which is the focus in this report—or universities may be highly vulnerable to false and misleading information and easy targets for intentional disinformation campaigns and propaganda.

although a large percentage of Americans now rely heavily on social media sites as a source of news, social media sites themselves are very different than the professional journalism that grounded most news in previous decades. Corporations like Facebook and Twitter are largely concerned with generating ad revenue and have little incentive to establish standards for content or to guard against mis or disinformation.

After 2004 Democrats became more likely to choose CNN and Republicans to choose Fox. This bifurcation and partisanship of news sources and their appeals to very different audiences appears to directly feed Truth Decay by giving rise to competing sets of “facts” and interpretations of those facts, driving the increasing disagreement on key issues, and sowing uncertainty about what is opinion and what is fact.

As the 24-hour news cycle forces media orgs to fill more time with content, they are forced to shift from reporting facts (of which there are only so many) to providing commentary, increasing the volume of opinion over that of fact and blurring the distinction between the two. Compared with deep investigative journalism, commentary is a cheaper endeavor, which helps media companies control costs and increase profits.

being aware of bias, either one’s own or that of a source, can reduce the effects of cognitive bias. One study found that forcing people to articulate alternative viewpoints or to cite evidence of a differing explanation can reduce the influence of biases over beliefs by forcing consideration of another perspective and engagement in critical thinking.

This tendency to hold on to existing beliefs and search for confirming information of these beliefs, also known as motivated reasoning, drives Truth Decay because it means that once a person forms a specific belief—whether it is based on fact, disinformation, or misinformation—that belief is likely to endure.

One of the most important cognitive biases is the human tendency to hold onto prior beliefs even when presented with info clearly demonstrating that these beliefs are incorrect or misguided. [researchers] find that individual misperceptions…are resilient to corrective info…Being confronted with this info can make misperceptions more ingrained and cause people to become less willing to consider alternatives.

To differentiate between drivers and agents, we define drivers as general conditions or changes that appear to be causing Truth Decay and agents as entities that accelerate the trends that constitute Truth Decay, intentionally or unintentionally, in order to advance political, economic, or other objectives.

we believe that Truth Decay would not be as pervasive and damaging if it were not propelled by all four drivers identified in this report.

That Truth Decay appears to be a global phenomenon is important because the information system itself is globalizing. This means that problems in one country or region are likely to spread to others. If this is the case, then a true solution or response to Truth Decay will require not only attention to the phenomenon as it manifests in the United States but also an assessment of its manifestations in other countries.