Disinformation & Why People Believe It

Why do people believe what's categorically false? What gets them there and what are the sociocultural aspects that play a role?

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

If it feels like you’re being deluged with disinformation, left spinning in disbelief of how someone can be in such denial of reality and feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, you’re not alone. It may help somewhat, to understand the root of why so many people it seems, believe what isn’t real.

Disinformation and misinformation are unintended consequences of the early days of this Digital Age. One of those issues we sort of knew about, but until it reached a global scale and impacted societies in more meaningful ways, we couldn’t really have prepared for.

Rather than look at the myriad forms of disinformation, which we see almost daily, I thought it might be interesting to put a cultural lens on the topic. To help understand why it takes off to begin with and why people do believe it, or may be tricked into believing it, which can also be dangerous.

It all boils down to one word. Storytelling. That’s the centre of the the whole issue. The nucleus of you will. Humans have used stories going back tat least 30,000 or so years and some think perhaps even 200,000 years. Which would suggest our non Homo Sapiens ancestors had such abilities.

Back to storytelling. Stories are how we make sense of our world. For ourselves and our communities. They are tied to myths, which we used to explain the reasons for things happening such as how the stars came to be in the sky, legends about creation or illness. Shamans relied heavily on myths (some still do) to excerpt their magical skills.

Stories give us a framework from which to make sense of the world. They also help inform our cultural identity. Such as the stories we tell about countries and regions we grew up in. They are deeply significant symbols of how we make sense of life and help build social cohesion, the formation of groups into communities and nations. Storytelling exists in every single human culture.

Somehow, ancient humans inherently understood that biological evolution was too slow for our species survival. So we invented culture in what is called gene-culture coevolution. To help culture spread and be useful, we told stories.

What is Disinformation?

Disinformation is, at its heart about stories. And not all stories have to be facts. It’s why we have fiction and non-fiction, but at the heart, they are stories. Other than academic papers and books, non-fiction books for the general public are pretty dry and boring if they don’t weave in stories. The stories are based on facts in non-fiction, but provide the metaphors and allegories for us to relate them to our real-world lives.

I could write this article in academic terms, even though I’m not currently an academic, but you’d probably fall asleep rather quickly.

Those that create disinformation (misinformation too) may be State actors waging psychological war on an enemy or other nation it wants to influence. Such as Russia, North Korea and China’s attempts to influence elections in democratic nations.

It may also be cybercriminals finding ways to lure prey into their scams. It may be a social group creating a narrative to suit political purposes. The goal of dis/misinformation to create stories that will distort or change the realities of other people. In attempts to create divisions or to bring others into their idea of reality.

Alex Jones through his InfoWars created disinformation because he had a view of the world, as do his followers that they likely know (or knew at the start) wasn’t true. There are many other social groups with different realities than the common one of the majority of society that hold counterculture views and use disinformation stories to try and persuade others that their reality is the better one.

Essentially, disinformation and misinformation are stories that run counter to the prevailing narrative of a given sociocultural system. With the arrival of Generative AI and the ability to create disinformation at scale, which is already happening, it creates even more pressure on society to deal with it as it may mean even more elements of society begin to believe in a different narrative, which leads to more social conflicts.

Why People Believe Disinformation

There are a number of reasons, from personal to groups and communities. It becomes effective at scale when larger parts of a society feel disenfranchised or that they’re role in a sociocultural system is threatened by the changes happening, usually because they fear a loss ofr power and control. That the way things are, or often perceived as were, being run, may no longer be so.

The internet and the devices we use to communicate via the internet, smartphones, tablets and PCs, collapsed time and space. Making the creation and distribution of information faster and broader in reach, than ever before in human history. This meant more stories could be create, told and distributed unlike ever before.

This all started with the printing press and advances in transportation technology and has only accelerated. We’ve largely cut out the need for transportation technologies with the arrival of satellites, fibre optic cables, wireless data and connected devices.

This meant the faster spreading of ideas, especially cultural ones and the stories we put around them. If a social group feels threatened by another social groups stories, it will begin to form its own narrative to counter those stories with its own. To reshape its reality. It’s another reason that conspiracy theories take hold and help in forming disinformation through myths and stories.

Over time, as one is exposed to these disinformation stories and conspiracy theories, and we find others who share a belief in them, they start to build communities of belief. Changing stories and myths is relatively easier than changing a social narrative.

Humans are social animals by nature. We survive better working together than not. Stories are the warp and woof of sociocultural systems. We have long sought out others who believe things similar to us. It’s why we have terms like confirmation bias or cognitive dissonance. To understand our information landscape.

In anthropology, this process is often referred to as Circuit Culture or the Circuit of Culture. It is a framework of five points and is very useful in understanding how online communities form, create and share stores. That’s for another article.

While there are approaches to helping people fight disinformation and some technologies such as version of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been tried, none have really worked. My own view is that the issue of disinformation is often addressed on an individualistic basis and would better be addressed at societal level. No framework has really been developed, but I’m sure one could be.

Perhaps what we need to do is look at how to start telling stories in a different way, at a more global scale. To consider the collapse of time and space cultures once had between them that allowed us the time to think about stories from others and the space we had between us. Our hyperconnected world is only going to become more connected across all aspects of sociocultural systems. We need then, to form a new narrative that is inclusive of all aspects of societies and cultures. No small task!

One way to start is to teach critical and systems thinking at a younger age in education systems and to keep that up through post-secondary systems. Information and knowledge management skills today are as important as maths, sciences, literature and art.