Familiarity breeds belief

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”

The words are Daniel Kahneman’s from his Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. Both a young friend of mine and one of my sons had repeatedly urged me to read this excellent book, but though I started it twice, somehow on each occasion I let other things take over and gave up before I’d got far.

Now, however, I’m making good progress and delighted by the insights it provides me, not least the sentiment I’ve just quoted.

Daniel Kahneman.
A Nobel-prize winner I should have paid attention to earlier

There’s an old principle that I’ve always believed, that the truth is often the best thing to tell, if only because it’s the version of events you know best so you’re less likely to get it wrong and end up contradicting yourself. The truth is easy because it’s familiar. It took Kahneman to point out the converse: if it’s familiar, there’s a serious risk you’ll take it for the truth whether it is or isn’t. As he points out, you don’t even have to repeat the entire statement to convince someone of a falsehood.

People who were repeatedly exposed to the phrase “the body temperature of a chicken” were more likely to accept as true the statement that “the body temperature of a chicken is 144°” (or any other arbitrary number). The familiarity of one phrase in the statement sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true.

We all know that mechanism from within ourselves. Someone tells us a piece of news, and if our first reaction is, “I’ve heard that” then not far behind will be the notion, “it must be true”. If we reflect on the information more carefully – the slow thinking, or “System 2”, of Kahneman’s analysis – we may well reject it, but our first reaction is to believe what we’ve already heard. And how many people go to that analytic phase? As Kahneman points out, System 1, the intuitive reaction is easy; System 2 is effortful and difficult.

Incidentally, I’m making no claim to superiority here: these are statements about all of us – I know that System 2 thinking is as laborious for me as for anyone, and I’m as inclined as everyone else to go with System 1 gut feel if possible.

So, say it often enough, and a proportion of the US electorate will believe that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. The evidence is strongly against that belief, but analysis of evidence is a System 2 activity. Even less considered is the seldom-mentioned view that it’s irrelevant anyway: the US Constitution doesn’t require candidates for the presidency to be born in the States, only to be born American. So John McCain could run, though he was born in the Panama Canal zone, and George Romney (father of Mitt) could be a candidate too, in 1968, despite being born in Mexico.

Again, absorbing that information requires System 2 behaviour.

Now consider the Fox News announcement that the attacker at the Quebec Mosque was himself a Muslim. The suggestion was that the six worshippers killed and the nineteen wounded had been targeted by a Muslim terrorist.

The story was untrue. The killer was a Canadian known to the police for his extreme right-wing views. Fox eventually admitted as much and deleted the item. By then, though, it had spread like wildfire across social media.

Would you be prepared to bet that this false story, made familiar by repetition, is now disbelieved by everyone?

Trump, whose favourite news channel is Fox, is emerging as a master of this kind of disinformation. Faced with the refusal of the scandal which may, in time, sink him – his campaign’s contacts with Russia, a story that feels like a new Watergate – he has hit back by accusing Barack Obama of having wiretapped Trump tower. 

Repeatedly hit back.

Trump has offered no evidence for his claim. Indeed, despite having decried unsourced stories himself, he has given no source for it. But evidence and awareness of hypocrisy are System 2 activities.

I don’t know what will come of the accusations. There have been some authoritative denials already but someone may emerge with some supporting information. It doesn’t matter. The story’s out there. It’s being repeated. It’ll become familiar. Many will see it as true. Not just about Obama, either: this is part of a flow of apparent information which will ultimately leave many with the feeling that any opponent of Trump’s is devious or even evil.

The converse also applies. Trump keeps telling us how much he’s achieved and how well his administration is running. In reality, there have been no achievements and the administration is chaotic. Again, it doesn’t matter. His claims will be picked up. They’ll become familiar. They’ll be believed.

There’s not much that’s funny about the post-truth age. But at least we can be grateful to Daniel Kanehman for exposing the mechanisms by which it works.

There are lies, damned lies and straight bigotry. Then there are right-wing campaign pledges

How appropriate it is that ‘post-truth’ has been selected by the Oxford Dictionaries as the new word of the year.

It doesn’t refer to what happens after the truth. The ‘post’ means beyond the time a notion was relevant, as in ‘post-modernism’, the concept which expresses the baby-boomer conviction that modernity ended with their youth. After all, we invented sex, as Philip Larkin pointed out:

Sexual intercourse began 
In nineteen sixty-three 
(which was rather late for me) – 
Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban 
And the Beatles' first LP.

Post-truth is our current period in which truth is merely an optional, and not particularly desirable, adjunct to political discourse. There was a time when one felt politicians made unrealistic promises, or promises that were far-fetched aspirations rather than real deliverables, but avoided downright lies.

Not any more.

In Britain, the point was made powerfully during the Brexit campaign. Supporters promised leaving the EU would release £350m a week for the NHS. They knew the EU didn’t cost £350m a week and that any funds would be needed for other purposes, but that didn’t stop them.

Once they’d won their campaign, they simply announced that well, no, the money wouldn’t actually be available. But who cared? The point was to win, not to deliver.

The other side was as bad, of course. They claimed the economy would collapse if the electorate voted for Brexit. Because that didn’t happen many Brexiteers are now trumpeting the success of Britain outside the EU. That’s before the country’s even started the process of leaving. It also ignores the timelag, measured in months or even years, that economic change requires to make its effects felt.

Many have pointed to the links between Brexit and Trump’s campaign in the States. Rightly. Even if post-truth is their only common feature.

Let’s take one of Trump’s more toxic pledges. He promoted building a wall along the US-Mexico border to keep immigrants out. Now, though, Trump is admitting that stretches of his ‘wall’ would be more accurately described as ‘fence’. Much of that fence is already in place and it doesn’t work.

But he also had less vile ideas, even if he expressed them with ugly violence. ‘Drain the swamp’ is a brutal way of putting it, but who would oppose the underlying idea, of ending corruption and the power of naked money in Washington?

What, though, has Trump done since his victory? He has appointed four members of his immediate family to his transition team. One of them, Jared Kushner, is the son of Charles Kushner. In 2005, Charles was in federal prison on 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign donations.

Now, that’s not a reason for turning on his son: I don’t believe in visiting the sins of the father on the next generation. No, where the story turns ugly is when we come to Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a keen Trump supporter who was expected to chair his Transition team. He had, however, been the very US Attorney who prosecuted Charles Kushner, describing his jailing as a “great victory for the people of New Jersey”. 

I like to picture the scene as Christie found himself in meetings with the son of the man he had jailed with such gloating triumph, and realised the victim’s son was going to have a major say over his political aspirations. The arrangement would prove career-limiting for Christie, who soon had to make his excuses and leave.

Kushner And Trump
The power behind the throne alongside its occupant?

He wasn’t the only one to go. An ally of Christie’s, Mike Rogers, previously a national security adviser to Trump, was the next out, followed on Wednesday of this week by Kevin O’Connor, another man close to Christie, who’d been leading on Justice matters in the Transition team.

So Trump has started the process of draining the swamp by appointing his son-in-law and giving him the power to settle old scores.

Meanwhile, he’s also appointed Steve Bannon Chief Strategist and Senior Counsellor. Bannon owes his reputation to promoting White Supremacist views on his Breitbart website, mouthpiece for the ‘alt-right’ (another candidate term for Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, as a less offensive synonym of ‘crypto-fascist’).

As well as his track record for racial harmony, Bannon brings in a flavour of high finance, as a former Goldman Sachs executive. In other words, he represents precisely the kind of arrogant banking interests that made the swamp Trump claims to want to drain.

It seems that Trump didn’t really intend to drain the swamp any more than he planned to build his wall. But then, that wasn’t the purpose of the exercise, was it? Like the £350m a week for the NHS, this wasn’t a policy, just a trap for votes. It achieved its purpose not by being delivered itself, but by delivering a victory to the campaign that voiced it.

Truth? Who needs it when victory is more easily gained without? This is the post-truth epoch.

Oh well. These things are temporary. Perhaps someday we can make ‘post-far-right-lies’ the new term of the year.