Human Beings Are Not Puppets, And We Should Probably Stop Acting Like They Are
A few years ago, we wrote about Joe Bernstein’s absolutely fantastic long read on how we’re probably all looking at the concept of disinformation wrong. As our title said, “most information on disinformation is misinformation.” The underlying thesis is that tons of people seem to believe that disinformation is this all powerful force that drives people to do things they never would have done otherwise, in absence of the disinformation.
As Bernstein deftly notes, there is little evidence to support this. However, there are plenty of reasons for social media platforms to play up that myth, because it actually increases the narrative about their own power — and the benefits of advertising on those platforms. Think about it: if the story is that a post on social media can turn a thinking human being into a slobbering, controllable, puppet, just think how easy it will be to convince people to buy your widget jammy.
I think about that article quite a bit, and it came to mind after recently reading a couple of big articles about the ongoing “crisis,” in the behavioral economics world involving accusations of falsified or made up data in papers by some of the biggest stars in the space, such as Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely (who some credit with popularizing the whole “behavioral economics” field, though others disagree).
If you’re unfamiliar with the underlying story and accusations, the stories I read were the New Yorker’s, They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? by Gideon Lewis-Kraus and the NY Times’ The Harvard Professor and the Bloggers by Noam Scheiber. I don’t think I have that much to say about the underlying issues, beyond noting that Gino’s defamation lawsuit against some bloggers who first highlighted the questionable nature of some of her research sure reads like a classic SLAPP suit.
But the reason this story brought back to mind Bernstein’s piece on the misinformation about disinformation, was that it struck me as somewhat related to this whole space of behavioral economics, and even the whole “nudge” concept popularized by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.
The whole field seems based on the same basic idea that was at the heart of what Bernstein found about disinformation: it’s all based on this idea that people are extremely malleable, and easily influenced by outside forces. But it’s just not clear that’s true.
Towards the end of the New Yorker piece, it quotes an unpublished blog post by one of the bloggers currently being sued by Gino, which seems to call into question this same thesis:
At the end of Simmons’s unpublished post, he writes, “An influential portion of our literature is effectively a made-up story of human-like creatures who are so malleable that virtually any intervention administered at one point in time can drastically change their behavior.” He adds that a “field cannot reward truth if it does not or cannot decipher it, so it rewards other things instead. Interestingness. Novelty. Speed. Impact. Fantasy. And it effectively punishes the opposite. Intuitive Findings. Incremental Progress. Care. Curiosity. Reality.”
I fear the same thing is happening in the narrative around disinformation as well. Disinformation remains a real issue — it exists — but, as we’ve seen over and over again elsewhere, the issue is often less about disinformation turning people into zombies, but rather one of confirmation bias. People who want to believe it search it out. It may confirm their priors (and those priors may be false), but that’s a different issue than the fully puppetized human being often presented as the “victim” of disinformation.
As in the field of behavioral economics, when we assume too much power in the disinformation (as that field may have chalked up too much power to the “nudge”), we get really bad outcomes. We believe things (and people) are both more and less powerful than they really are. Indeed, it’s kind of elitist. It’s basically saying that the elite at the top can make little minor changes that somehow leads the sheep puppets of people to do what they want.
And that’s ridiculous.
As we look at all these things, we need to stop thinking of people as easily malleable puppets. They’re not. They’re human beings with complex beliefs and motivations and reasons.