All the news that fits human biases: how instincts drive fake online stories

Fake news has become a hot issue in post-election America as companies, people and news organizations try to understand why lies and madeup stories have become so pervasive and effective online.

Many have thrust blame onto Internet companies like Facebook and Google, which act as conduits of information for the vast majority of computer-using adults, arguing that tech firms should do more to set facts and trustworthy information apart from falsehoods.

But researchers who study human behavior believe the fault may lie elsewhere: in the human mind.

“This is a deep, primate reality: We love being groomed. Monkeys do it by touching each other, but we also groom linguistically. We love when people tell us that we’re right and we’re OK,” said Agustín Fuentes, chair of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Fake news “is all about making people feel OK. It justifies their anger or their fear. It tells

them, ‘You’re right to think this way.’ It validates them. That’s powerful stuff. It has a huge neuropsychological impact on us.”

Though the Internet has allowed hoaxes and frauds to reach more people than ever before, some scholars believe fake news has become so effective because it taps into some of our most basic human instincts.

Walking a person’s 21stcentury brain back from primal urges isn’t easy, experts said, which is why it may take an old-school solution to solve this digital problem.

Fake news, or misinformation found on newsy-looking websites that trick people into believing they are real, typically falls into one of two categories: the kind that seeks to manipulate people, spread misinformation and cast doubt on traditional media and public institutions, and the kind that uses sensational — and false — stories to attract enough readers to make money through advertising.

Both have found success in social media, as stories with outlandish and evocative headlines spread easily and rapidly via Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication at Stanford University, said this has ushered in a new kind of deception that people are less equipped to handle because it is so unusual: Our most trusted circle of friends, family and co-workers may be lying to us, not because they want to deceive, but because they genuinely believe the lies are true.

“This is a totally new area,” he said. “There’s interpersonal deception where we lie to each other, identity-based deception where you don’t know who someone is and they’re using that to manipulate you, and then there’s this . ... If my dad shares something with me that is false, he’s not sharing it to deceive me. He’s sharing it because he believes it’s true.”

That creates a problem when people look to each other for information, he said.

People are natural information-seekers, but, experts said, our ability to discern good information from bad information can’t catch up with the technology that can spread it so quickly around the world.

A recent Stanford study found that teenagers, widely considered to be the most technologically fluent among us, were easily duped by unreliable sources and deceptive advertisements peppered throughout news sites and social media feeds.

When people can’t tell the difference between factual information and made-up news stories, they evaluate them as if the two are equal.

This, scholars said, is where several base impulses may begin to take over the rational part of the brain.

The first is that humans want to be right, experts said. Rather than seeking out correct information, people are more likely to be drawn toward information that corroborates their views. This is called confirmation bias.

Studies have shown that when people get overwhelmed by information, or don’t know what sources to trust, they’re most likely to go with what sounds right to them — based on their own deeply held convictions.

People are also more likely to trust other people they know personally over strangers and institutions like government, academia and media, research has shown.

Hancock said that groups of trusted sources may also include people you don’t know personally, as long as they seem to be someone with whom you can identify.

In today’s society, he said, that can boil down to shared identity, like age, race and gender.

“We’re slammed with massive amounts of information and we have to make a decision quickly,” said Hancock. “So we ask ourselves, ‘Did it come from a friend? Does it make sense to me? Does it jibe with my world view? Yes? Then we’re ready to go.’”

Fake news often plays to people’s emotional responses to encourage them to share a link. Made-up stories tend to try to solicit fear, anger or outrage — and are often able to do so with just the headline.

This plays into humans’ penchant for emotional response and how that can outweigh the logic-driven reasoning required to evaluate the veracity of an outlandish claim — like the made-up FBI statistics that President-elect Donald Trump tweeted during his campaign that 81 percent of white homicide victims were killed by blacks or his recent lie that “millions” of people voted illegally, tipping the popular vote in Hillary Clinton’s favor. (Neither claim is true.)

“Fake news is built to take advantage of our deep evolutionary need for comfort, but also plays on our fight-or-flight response,” Fuentes said. “When we see a headline that really, really pisses us off, our brain has the same freak-out response that it has when we see a car coming at us.”

Though people are “more than capable” of thinking through problems and using critical reasoning to debunk Internet rumors and spot fake-news stories or websites, Fuentes said, that takes work.

It’s a lot easier to fall back on a louder instinct like trusting your friends without checking their sources or reading a story that seems to demonstrate how right you are.

So how do we solve our fake-news problem? People have to relearn how to process information, experts said.

“It’s tough. We’ve got to learn to do what our ancestors (did) for millions of years, to get creative and get around those kinds of short circuits to our thinking,” Fuentes said. “Get past the initial response and use this big gigantic brain that we have to figure stuff out.”

Scholars advised going beyond a story’s headline, being an active reader, checking sources and evaluating the trustworthiness of an organization as skills everyone online should practice.

“Try just two times a day going slightly past the headline, do the reading and check out the sources of what you’re reading,” Fuentes said. “If everyone in the country did that, we would be a lot better off.”