Dear smart people: Stop believing hoaxes

‘In my opinion it’s all fake. It’s mind manipulation on a global scale’’, said the message sent to me on March 14th when coronavirus was already overwhelming hospitals in Italy. I was utterly amazed. The sender lives overseas and I know she is well educated and intelligent – yet she subscribes to the conspiratorial theory that holds the virus is a political ploy to hurtle us toward a totalitarian surveillance state.

I responded by explaining what the public health experts thought could happen if the virus was not contained.

She dismissed it all as unreliable and biased. How could I be so credulous? She wrote mockingly and urged me to open my eyes and question more.

After a few weeks of futile back and forth messaging, my sense of frustration grew and so did my use of exclamation marks:

‘‘This is real!!! I don’t know how else to convince you!!’’

The breaking point came when she sent me a viral video that encouraged viewers to use a hair dryer to blow hot air up their noses as a simple home remedy for Covid-19.

The narrator in the video, Dr Dimke, who appears to run a digital marketing company and has a PhD in education – but no medical qualification – clearly knew how to engineer a convincing viral video.

The video incorporated many of the known elements used by purveyors of disinformation: an academic title (Dr Dimke), scientific imagery (microscopic photos of the virus), common information (coronavirus resides at the back of the nose) and familiar associations (high temperatures kill most viruses).

When I received the video, I did what I always do when I come across a new claim. I searched the web to see if I could either confirm or debunk it.

The well-known fact-checking site snopes.com had debunked it as a potentially dangerous hoax. I shared the site’s findings with my online interlocutor.

She did not believe it. She thought the factchecking site ‘‘wasn’t unbiased’’ and Dr Dimke’s claim made perfect scientific sense to her.

That’s when my frustration turned to outrage and the exclamation marks came back with a vengeance.

‘‘Please tell me you are joking !!!! Please!!!’’

I admit that was a mistake. My response was condescending and inappropriate. My other mistake was to assume that I could ever change my interlocutor’s view when that view was constructed to confirm her general conspiratorial world view. Let me explain what I mean.

David Robson is the author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and How to Make Wiser Decisions. He wrote in The Guardian, "For any issue that strikes at the core of who we are, greater brainpower may simply serve to preserve that identity at the expense of the truth’’.

As it turns out, intelligent people use their considerable brainpower to build a credible case to convince themselves that what is untrue is in fact true, simply because it adheres to what they are invested in – both emotionally and ideologically.

There is also another reason why people who score high on all of the rational and intellectual metrics could nonetheless believe in hoaxes.

Reportedly, some intelligent people have a ‘‘thinking style’’ that relies more on intuition and gut instinct.

In other words, some smart people are not in the habit of using their analytical skills for normal decision-making. This explains why some welleducated people are not immune to disinformation.

Speaking of disinformation, research shows that the most effective way of spreading falsehood is by repetition. The more people hear an idea, the more likely they are to believe it.

This means even an attempt to debunk an idea could contribute to strengthening it. No wonder, despite mountains of scientific evidence to the contrary, 37 per cent of Americans still believe global warming is a hoax (the Right-wing media keeps repeating this lie).

But not all disinformation is equal. Some is harmless – like the reports of the couple who named their daughter ‘‘Brexit’’. But others are dangerous – even deadly.

For instance a recent report from one province in Iran showed that ‘‘more people had died from drinking industrial-strength alcohol, based on a false claim that it could protect you from coronavirus, than from the virus itself’’.

But what can we do to stop this?

To begin with, we should stop referring to disinformation as fake news. Fake news is an oxymoron, which lends itself to undermining the credibility of news.

The media plays a huge role and has to remember that information, which may interest some of the public, is not always in the public interest (climate change denial articles are obvious examples).

Educating is also important. Children from a young age should be taught to apply their critical and skeptical thinking to identify disinformation.

We need our smart people, not only to pass exams, but also to be able to defend themselves and the society against the scourge of mistruths.

Some smart people are not in the habit of using their analytical skills for normal decisionmaking.