What makes people susceptible to fake news?This question is part of a larger psychological inquiry into how people process political information. And a wide-ranging debate has emerged with two camps.

First, there’s the Reason Pessimists camp. The Pessimists hold that, in general, people who are more prolific reasoners will showmorepolitical bias in processing information. Their idea is that everyone is biased, and people who engage in extensive thinking will use their intelligence and knowledge to justifyeven more skewed比他们本来持有的位置。根据这种观点，推理主要是合理化。I gave you a glimpse of Reason Pessimism, whenI discussed Dan Kahan’s Cultural Cognition Thesis关于否认气候变化。Kahan claims that not only does greater knowledge not predict climate change acceptance among conservatives, it is actuallynegatively correlatedwith acceptance. And Kahan points tomotivated reasoningto explain this: he thinks the deniers’ “reasoning” is guided by cultural motivations, so more “reasoning” means more distortion. Another example of Pessimism is Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’sview of reasonin general. They think the human ability to reason evolved not for reaching truth but for enabling us to argumentatively persuade other people of things, whether they’re true or not. Reason, on this view, is like a partisan lawyer (and not much else).

Second, there’s the Reason Optimists camp. The Optimists hold that, in general, people who are more prolific reasoners will showlesspolitical bias. Their idea is that, though everyone has biases, reasoning will help people to work through inconsistencies in their positions, seek out relevant facts, and be open to persuasion by evidence. The Optimist who disagrees most prominently with Kahan about climate change psychology is Michael Ranney, whose work I also discussed in relation to Kahan’s. Hisstudiesshow that informing people about themechanismsof climate change increases acceptance. Ranney is in the Reason Optimists Camp, because his view implies that people with appropriate knowledge will be more likely to reason their way to the correct position (acceptance). Optimists also make points against Mercier and Sperber to the effect that reasoning often helps us avoid disasters (for example, “Well, if A and B both got sick and the only thing they ate in common was that weird-looking plant, then maybe…”). So reasoningcan不仅仅是合理化。

(Side note for anyone who likes paradoxes of self-reference. An Optimist might also diagonalize against the Reason Pessimists: they seem to have arrived at their negative view of reason throughreasoning; so if their negative view of reasoning is right, then we shouldn’t take their arguments seriously! Alternately, if the Pessimists’ reasoning toward their position is solid, that proves that their negative view of reason is not true in a general way, since their own reasoning is a counterexample.)

在否认气候变化的辩论中，我认为理性乐观主义者(如兰尼)的论据更有力，但理性悲观主义者(如卡汗)的媒体报道更多。但随着这场争论的结束，还有更多的工作要做，所以我在这一点上不会说更多。

Furthermore, there are other fronts on which moves are being made by the members of the two camps. And this brings us to our question about fake news. (There are, of course, different ways the phrase “fake news” gets used. The current POTUS uses it to meanany journalism I don’t like. But there is a more legitimate meaning, namely:false but sensational-seeming information that’s packaged to look like a genuine news report. I have the latter sense in mind.)

因此，在两大阵营的辩论中出现的一个重要问题是:推理让人们更容易受到假新闻的影响，还是更不容易受到假新闻的影响?

A Pessimist would say “more,” but an Optimist would say “less.” Who’s right?

On this very front, the psychologists Gordon Pennycook and David Rand recently published an interesting study, one that looks good for Optimists: “Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning.”

他们的主要实验方法是给人们进行认知反射测试(CRT)，看看它是否能预测人们会在多大程度上被假新闻所欺骗(他们的刺激因素包括这样的“BLM暴徒用自拍抗议特朗普总统……意外地朝自己的脸开枪”。-Freedom Daily”).

The CRT tests how prone people are to overriding their initial intuitions and thinking further about a given problem or issue. Here are two items from a typical CRT.

1. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long does it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
2. A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The answers are 100 for the first and 10 cents for the second, right? Wrong! The correct answers are five minutes and 5 cents (work it out). What’s interesting is that everyone who sees these has the same incorrectintuitive这些答案浮现在脑海中。但更倾向于分析思维的人更有可能质疑那些直观的答案。So the CRT measures how much people are disposed (and able) to engage in reflective thinking—orreasoning.

This all gives rise to two opposite predictions. A Pessimist would predict that people who score higher in analytic thinking would bemorelikely to accept fake news (if it’s partisan in their direction), since that extra thinking only goes to rationalizing what supports their antecedent political position. But the Optimist predicts that people who score higher in analytic thinking will belesslikely to accept fake news (even if it’s partisan in their direction), since the extra thinking helps them detect error.

This round is a win for the Optimists. Pennycook and Rand found that those who perform better on the CRT rate fake news as less accurate than poor performers do. In other words, people who do more thinking are less likely to be suckers. Importantly, this held even for fake news that supported one’s own political position. So, for example, someone who was pro-Clinton and did well on the CRT waslesslikely to be suckered by pro-Clinton fake news than someone who was pro-Clinton and did poorly on the CRT (and similar,mutatis mutandis, for the pro-Trump camp).

这并不意味着分析型思考者在过滤假新闻方面是完美的。远离它!此外，有一个明显的效应表明，与另一方的假新闻相比，各种各样的人更容易受到自己党派方向的假新闻的影响。But the point is that people who were more analytic werelessvulnerable than those who were less analytic. And that suggests Optimism about the value of reason.

From the practical perspective, what this also suggests is that laziness is the enemy. People usually fail to detect fake news not because their reasoning is biased, but because they justdidn’t think. But note also that the laziness (failure to reason at all)is itselfbiased: we’re prone to subject news favorable to the opposite party to intense rational scrutiny—and then be lazy about scrutinizing information that flatters our own positions. Otherwise put, asDavid Dunningnoted in a lecture on fake news at theAssociation for Psychological Sciencerecently, skepticism of the other is not the main problem; rather, it’s uncritical acceptance of media that are favorable to one’s own side. So we should scrutinize information that’s favorable to our own political leanings more thoroughly.

Analytic thinkers do this more than other people as a matter of course. But I think the Optimist’s recommendation to reason more should go for everyone—at least when it comes to fighting fake news.