Winston Churchill once said a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on—and that was before social media. False stories on X are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true ones—and true stories take six times longer to reach a sample of 1,500 than false ones. (Will Hutton)
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The human understanding, when once it has adopted an opinion… draws all things else to support it and agree with it. (Francis Bacon)
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I’m currently reading a fascinating new book by Alex Edmans—May Contain Lies: How stories, statistics, and studies exploit our biases—and what we can do about it.
Here are a few interesting insights he offers in terms of how we handle (or don’t handle) the truth:
One half of Americans obtain news “often” or “sometimes” from social media, where false stories spread further, faster and deeper than the truth because they’re more attention grabbing.
His point: We’re inundated with falsehoods, making it harder than ever before to peel away the layers of untruth to get to the truth. On top of that, Edmans tells us that the more extreme the story, report. study, or ideology, the more black and white it is, the more likely we are to embrace it. (Have you noticed that the “extremes” rule both political parties?)
That, in turn, makes it difficult for us to engage with ideas that challenge or contradict our current beliefs:
Why do we react so angrily to claims we don’t like? Neuroscientists Jonas Kaplan and Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris showed how confirmation bias is wired into our brain… People respond to opposing views as if they’re being chased by a wild animal.
In other words, when something we believe is challenged, rather than looking at the challenge objectively, our amygdala kicks in and puts us into fight or flight.
We don’t like to be wrong. We don’t want to be wrong. We don’t want to admit we might be wrong. If we are wrong about A, then what else might we be wrong about? The thought terrifies us.
So we fight by retreating more deeply into our beliefs, hanging on to them more tightly, even if the evidence we’re being presented makes more sense, is backed up by fact, or is more compelling. Some research suggests that the more we know we’re wrong about something the more we’ll fight to justify that (wrong) belief.
But there’s another reason why we have a hard time engaging with information that contradicts our long held beliefs:
Dismissing evidence we don’t like releases dopamine, the same pick-me-up chemical that’s triggered when we go for a run, enjoy a meal, or have sex.
Did you catch that? Dismissing something that contradicts our assumptions or thinking is orgasmic!
Think of the explosion of energy that takes place when one group of protestors confronts an opposing group of protestors. That’s a dopamine rush on steroids. It may leave us breathless… but it also leaves us prey to untruths. Rather than taking a moment and looking at something rationally, many of our long held beliefs are protected by our emotions.
The problem is that, once we land on a “truth,” we, as Francis Bacon reminds us, simply mine evidence to back up that truth, rather than considering other options. And in a social media world, where algorithms keep us in our thought bubbles, we’ve become increasingly isolated from curiosity, insight, and wisdom.
Biased interpretation means that we see what we want to see; biased search means we find what we want to find. But, as Erdman reminds us, finding out what’s wrong is the only way to find out what’s right.
It may seem safe to stay in our belief bubbles. But life isn’t about being safe. It’s about curiosity, growth, learning, and adventure. It’s about daring to challenge our thinking to be more open to the truth.
On the other side of our belief bubbles is a world of insight and wisdom. Some of it will confirm what we believe. Some of it will take us down new paths of illumination that fill us with wonder.
Books open up those paths of curiosity to us—histories, biographies, science fiction, fantasy, essays, kids books.
Books are the antidote to our resistant belief bubbles.
As a friend of mine was put it: You won’t go thirsty if you are willing to drink from strange wells.
Or, to say it another way: You won’t go hungry if you are willing to expand your book diet.