They could even imply something was truthful when it was not. Politicians do this all the time, says Rogers, a behavioural scientist at Harvard Kennedy School. He and colleagues therefore set out to understand more about it. He found that paltering was an extremely common tactic of negotiation.
Over half the business executives in his study admitted to using the tactic. The research also found that the person doing the paltering believed it was more ethical than lying outright. The individuals who had been deceived, however, did not distinguish between lying and paltering. Politicians commonly manipulate the truth Credit: Getty Images. It is also difficult to spot a misleading "fact" when we hear something that on the face of it, sounds true.
Now you can get married, join the Army, work full-time. Since , 16 and year-olds cannot work full-time in England, but can in the other three home nations with some restrictions.
In another example, the then-presidential-nominee Donald Trump paltered during the presidential debates. He was questioned about a housing discrimination lawsuit early on in his career and stated that his company had given "no admission of guilt". While they may not have admitted it, an investigation by the New York Times found that his company did discriminate based on race.
And even if we do spot misleading truths, social norms can prevent us from challenging whether or not they are deceptive. Take a now infamous interview in the UK, where journalist Jeremy Paxman interviewed the politician Michael Howard pictured below. But if it can be liberating, it can also be crippling. Trump had his press secretary summon the press to insist that they believe him, and not their own, lying eyes, about the size of his inaugural crowd.
One court after another has restrained his executive orders limiting travel, partially because he has disregarded advice to cease commenting on the cases. His unsubstantiated claim that Obama wiretapped his phones has embroiled his administration in weeks of controversy. Perhaps no one else on earth is as prone to having their biases confirmed as an American president—surrounded by aides who serve at his pleasure, courted by sycophants who cater to his whims, subjected to malicious partisan attacks that make it tempting to conclude all criticisms are lodged in bad faith.
Most presidents struggle against this, relying on spouses, longtime friends, and confidants to keep them grounded—and despite that, often succumb to the temptations of confirmation bias. Trump sits alone in the White House, his wife in New York. He seems to see constant affirmation as less a danger, than a necessity.
In , John Adams stood before a jury, and argued that—despite what he, and they, might want to believe—the British soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre had been exercising their right of self-defense in the face of mob violence.
A professor at a major U. In the United States, corporate filtering of information will impose the views of the economic elite. Several other respondents also cited this as a major flaw of this potential remedy.
They argued against it for several reasons, including the fact that it enables even broader government and corporate surveillance and control over more of the public.
Lying is a powerful way to do that. To stop that requires high surveillance — which means government oversight which has its own incentives not to tell the truth. Algorithmic solutions to replacing human judgment are subject to hidden bias and will ultimately fail to accomplish this goal. They will only continue the centralization of power in a small number of companies that control the flow of information. Most of the respondents who gave hopeful answers about the future of truth online said they believe technology will be implemented to improve the information environment.
They noted their faith was grounded in history, arguing that humans have always found ways to innovate to overcome problems. Most of these experts do not expect there will be a perfect system — but they expect advances. A number said information platform corporations such as Google and Facebook will begin to efficiently police the environment to embed moral and ethical thinking in the structure of their platforms. They hope this will simultaneously enable the screening of content while still protecting rights such as free speech.
Adam Lella. In fact, the companies are already beginning to take steps in this direction. An associate professor at a U. Adam Lella , senior analyst for marketing insights at comScore Inc. If there is a great amount of pressure from the industry to solve this problem which there is , then methodologies will be developed and progress will be made to help mitigate this issue in the long run.
Many respondents who hope for improvement in the information environment mentioned ways in which new technological solutions might be implemented.
In order to reduce the spread of fake news, we must deincentivize it financially. Amber Case. A longtime U. It is profitable to do so, profit made by creating an article that causes enough outrage that advertising money will follow.
If an article bursts into collective consciousness and is later proven to be fake, the sites that control or host that content could refuse to distribute advertising revenue to the entity that created or published it. This would require a system of delayed advertising revenue distribution where ad funds are held until the article is proven as accurate or not.
A lot of fake news is created by a few people, and removing their incentive could stop much of the news postings. Market makers will increasingly incorporate security quality as a factor relevant to corporate valuation. The legal climate for security research will continue to improve, as its connection to national security becomes increasingly obvious. These changes will drive significant corporate and public sector improvements in security during the next decade.
However, non-certified, compelling-but-untrue information will also proliferate. So the new divide will be between the people who want their information to be real vs. A number of respondents believe there will be policy remedies that move beyond whatever technical innovations emerge in the next decade. They offered a range of suggestions, from regulatory reforms applied to the platforms that aid misinformation merchants to legal penalties applied to wrongdoers.
Some think the threat of regulatory reform via government agencies may force the issue of required identities and the abolition of anonymity protections for platform users. The excuse that the scale of posts on social media platforms makes human intervention impossible will not be a defense.
Regulatory options may include unbundling social networks like Facebook into smaller entities. Legal options include reversing the notion that providers of content services over the internet are mere conduits without responsibility for the content. These regulatory and legal options may not be politically possible to affect within the U. Sally Wentworth , vice president of global policy development at the Internet Society, warned against too much dependence upon information platform providers in shaping solutions to improve the information environment.
And yet, it feels like as a society, we are outsourcing this function to private entities that exist, ultimately, to make a profit and not necessarily for a social good.
How much power are we turning over to them to govern our social discourse? Do we know where that might eventually lead? But governments, users and society are being too quick to turn all of the responsibility over to internet platforms. Who holds them accountable for the decisions they make on behalf of all of us? Do we even know what those decisions are? Being banned from social media is one obvious one.
Speech can be regulated in certain venues, but obviously not in all. Federal and perhaps even international guidelines would be useful. Many of those who expect the information environment to improve anticipate that information literacy training and other forms of assistance will help people become more sophisticated consumers. They expect that users will gravitate toward more reliable information — and that knowledge providers will respond in kind. When the television became popular, people also believed everything on TV was true.
Irene Wu. One hopeful respondent said a change in economic incentives can bring about desired change. Information consumers, fed up with false narratives, will increasingly shift toward more-trusted sources, resulting in revenue flowing toward those more trusted sources and away from the junk.
This does not mean that all people will subscribe to either scientific or journalistic method or both , but they will gravitate toward material the sources and institutions they find trustworthy, and those institutions will, themselves, demand methods of verification beyond those they use today. Right now, many people naively believe what they read on social media.
In addition, there will be a reaction to the prevalence of false information so that people are more willing to act to assure their information will be accurate. In , Facebook, Google and others had no incentive to pay attention to the problem. After the election, the issue of fake information has been spotlighted. Many respondents agree that misinformation will persist as the online realm expands and more people are connected in more ways. Still, the more hopeful among these experts argue that progress is inevitable as people and organizations find coping mechanisms.
They say history validates this. Furthermore, they said technologists will play an important role in helping filter out misinformation and modeling new digital literacy practices for users. We were in this position before, when printing presses broke the existing system of information management. A new system emerged and I believe we have the motivation and capability to do it again. Jonathan Grudin. We are now seeing the downsides of that transformation, with bad actors manipulating the new freedoms for antisocial purposes, but techniques for managing and mitigating those harms will improve, creating potential for freer, but well-governed, information environments in the s.
It will again involve information channeling more than misinformation suppression; contradictory claims have always existed in print, but have been manageable and often healthy. The Weekly World News had a circulation of over a million for its mostly fictional news stories that are printed and sold in a format closely resembling a newspaper.
Many readers recognized it as entertainment, but not all. More subtly, its presence on the newsstand reminded everyone that anything can be printed. Things will improve because people — individually and collectively — will make it so. Many of these respondents said the leaders and engineers of the major information platform companies will play a significant role. Some said they expect some other systematic and social changes will alter things.
Not monotonically, and not without effort, but fundamentally, I still believe that the efforts to improve the information environment will ultimately outweigh efforts to devolve it.
A number of these respondents said information platform corporations such as Google and Facebook will begin to efficiently police the environment through various technological enhancements. They expressed faith in the inventiveness of these organizations and suggested the people of these companies will implement technology to embed moral and ethical thinking in the structure and business practices of their platforms, enabling the screening of content while still protecting rights such as free speech.
When faced with novel predatory phenomena, counter-forces emerge to balance or defeat them. We are at the beginning of a largescale negative impact from the undermining of a social sense of reliable fact.
Counter-forces are already emerging. A professor in technology law at a West-Coast-based U. Like email spam, this problem can never entirely be eliminated, but it can be managed. The areas that I had found make the most racist searches underpay black people. When Nate Silver, the polling guru , looked for the geographic variable that correlated most strongly with support in the Republican primary for Trump, he found it in the map of racism I had developed.
To be provocative and to encourage more research in this area, let me put forth the following conjecture, ready to be tested by scholars across a range of fields. The discrimination black people regularly experience in the United States appears to be fuelled more widely by explicit, if hidden, hostility.
But, for other groups, subconscious prejudice may have a more fundamental impact. For example, I was able to use Google searches to find evidence of implicit prejudice against another segment of the population: young girls.
And who, might you ask, would be harbouring bias against girls? Their parents. But this question is not asked equally about boys and girls. Are parents picking up on legitimate differences between young girls and boys?
Perhaps young boys are more likely than young girls to use big words or show objective signs of giftedness? At young ages, girls have consistently been shown to have larger vocabularies and use more complex sentences. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls.
In fact, on every search term related to intelligence I tested, including those indicating its absence, parents were more likely to be inquiring about their sons rather than their daughters. Primarily, anything related to appearance. Just as with giftedness, this gender bias is not grounded in reality. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see — or worry about — overweight girls much more frequently than overweight boys.
Parents are also one-and-a-half times more likely to ask whether their daughter is beautiful than whether their son is handsome. In fact, I did not find a significant relationship between any of these biases and the political or cultural makeup of a state. It has revealed the continued existence of millions of closeted gay men; widespread animus against African Americans; and an outbreak of violent Islamophobic rage that only got worse when the president appealed for tolerance.
Not exactly cheery stuff. If people consistently tell us what they think we want to hear, we will generally be told things that are more comforting than the truth. Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought. But there are at least three ways this knowledge can improve our lives.
First, there can be comfort in knowing you are not alone in your insecurities and embarrassing behaviour. Google searches can help show you are not alone. If you were anything like me, you ignored your teacher and sat there silently, afraid to open your mouth. The anonymous, aggregate Google data can tell us once and for all how right our teachers were.
Plenty of basic, sub-profound questions lurk in other minds, too. The second benefit of digital truth serum is that it alerts us to people who are suffering. The Human Rights Campaign has asked me to work with them in helping educate men in certain states about the possibility of coming out of the closet. They are looking to use the anonymous and aggregate Google search data to help them decide where best to target their resources.
The final — and, I think, most powerful — value in this data is its ability to lead us from problems to solutions. Recall that every time he argued that people should respect Muslims more, the people he was trying to reach became more enraged.
Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response Obama might have wanted. When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. Two months after that speech, Obama gave another televised speech on Islamophobia, this time at a mosque.
Obama spent little time insisting on the value of tolerance. Obama again spoke of Muslim athletes and armed service members, but also talked of Muslim police officers and firefighters, teachers and doctors. And my analysis of the Google searches suggests this speech was more successful than the previous one. Many of the hateful, rageful searches against Muslims dropped in the hours afterwards. There are other potential ways to use search data to learn what causes, or reduces, hate.
For example, we might look at how racist searches change after a black quarterback is drafted in a city, or how sexist searches change after a woman is elected to office. Learning of our subconscious prejudices can also be useful.
Google search data and other wellsprings of truth on the internet give us an unprecedented look into the darkest corners of the human psyche. This is at times, I admit, difficult to face. But it can also be empowering. We can use the data to fight the darkness.
When I was doing my PhD, in , I found this tool called Google Trends that tells you what people are searching, and where, and I became obsessed with it. The traditional data sets left a lot to be desired. What would your search records reveal about you?
There are definitely things about me that you could figure out. You worked at Google?
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