What's Changing? - Truth

Please see below selected recent truth-related change.

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November 2024

Being someone who pleases people is a pattern of behaviour riddled with problems, as much for the perpetrator as for their audience: the people-pleaser is someone who feels they have no option but to mould themselves to the expectations of others, and yet, harbours all manner of secret and at points dangerous reservations and resentments. Putting it bluntly, claims The School of Life, we could say that the people pleaser is a liar. It sounds brutal, but the people-pleaser is lying for poignant reasons: not in order to gain advantage, but because they are terrified of the displeasure of others.
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March 2024

11% of the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism confessed to using AI in the process of researching or writing their submissions.

December 2023

Daniel Williams, a philosopher at the University of Sussex, argued that misinformation is the symptom of deeper societal issues rather than the cause. It emerges from polarisation, institutional distrust and governmental corruption and censoring misinformation or debunking false ideas may therefore be ineffective and even aggravate societal problems.
However, Eliot Higgins argued in the FT that if disinformation is left unchecked, then the future looks very bleak. Faith in traditional institutions - whether media, academia or governance - would further wane. Over time, scepticism morphs into cynicism, and every source, regardless of its credibility, is viewed with suspicion. Disinformation, by its nature, is divisive.

April 2023

In his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about hyperreality: the emergence of a media environment in which the boundaries between the real and our representations of the real become ever-more blurred. Digital media have massively amplified that phenomenon, leading to a world in which the difference between image and reality is hard to discern, or even meaningless.

February 2023

Maria Popova noted that, long before psychologists began exploring the curious cognitive mechanism of how our delusions keep us sane, even before W.H. Auden contemplated the crucial difference between false and true enchantment, Virginia Woolf explored the powerful positive side of illusions in Orlando: A Biography considered by some “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” which gave us Woolf’s fiction-veiled insight into perennial truths about the elasticity of time, the fluidity of gender, and our propensity for self-doubt in creative work.

January 2023

The study of lying is at least a century old, noted Psyche, and thousands of scientific papers have been published. Researchers have mainly focused on two key questions, namely: how good is the average person at detecting lies; and what, if any, are the behavioural signs of lying? There is only one reliable procedure based on common sense, and that is to simply find out what the supposed liar says that does not fit with other stuff that one may know. This is a recommended strategy for police interviews and, after a century of research, the only one to reliably disclose lying in everyday contexts.

December 2022

Further reading:

October 2022

It is difficult to detect lies accurately. Lie detectors, such as polygraphs, which work by measuring the level of anxiety in a subject while they answer questions, are considered “theoretically weak” and of dubious reliability. A more recent approach to spot liars is based on interviewing technique and psychological manipulation, with results published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. The technique is part of a new generation of cognitive-based lie-detection methods that are being increasingly researched and developed. These approaches postulate that the mental and strategic processes adopted by truth-tellers during interviews differ significantly from those of liars.

July 2022

Research suggests that children as young as two years old will lie, and by eight years old, 80% of children will lie if they can get away with it. One study suggests that most of us lie at least once in a ten-minute conversation.

June 2022

From white lies to grave crimes, people keep many types of secrets - some of which can weigh heavily on our wellbeing. However, there are differences between being secretive and being a private person. Often, the view of the morality of the experience is an important distinguishing element.
Further reading:
- Why you should always question your perceptions - Big Think

May 2022

Previous research had already shown that repeating a claim increases that claim’s perceived truth value. For a long time, though, it was assumed that this so-called truth-by-repetition effect only applied to claims whose truth value was unambiguous. However, a more recent study confirmed what politicians and advertisers knew all along: that truth-by-repetition works on virtually any kind of claim, even highly implausible ones.
Self-deception is incredibly common, and may have evolved to bring some personal benefits. We lie to ourselves to protect our self-images, which allows us to act immorally while maintaining a clear conscience. According to research, self-deception may have even evolved to help us to persuade others; if we start believing our own lies, it’s much easier to get other people to believe them, too.
Our ability to determine reliable information from misinformation is one of the more pressing challenges of our age. A 2019 study from Yale found that we’re just as likely to believe information that derives from a single source as we are information that comes from multiple independent sources. The research underlined how misinformation can spread as we can all too easily believe a consensus exists when it doesn’t. This work was then built on by a subsequent study from the University of New South Wales, which showed how this illusion can be reduced if we give people more information about how the original sources arrived at their conclusions.

January 2022

Researchers at Tufts University in the US created a model that describes the dissemination of fake news. They said the model will allow the development of new media and content strategies that combat disinformation. Scientists who study the dissemination of information often take a page from epidemiologists, modelling the spread of false beliefs on how a disease spreads through a social network. Most such models treat the people in the networks as all equally taking in any new belief passed on to them by contacts. The Tufts researchers instead based their model on the notion that our pre-existing beliefs can strongly influence whether we accept new information. Many people reject factual information supported by evidence if it takes them too far from what they already believe.

August 2021

A study of 260 dogs found that, in some cases, dogs can tell when people are lying. The experiments involved giving dogs information about the location of food. The majority of the dogs did not follow false suggestions when they knew humans were lying, according to researchers at the University of Vienna.

July 2021

Richard V. Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that the problem is not discerning who is telling the truth or lying but actually trying to tell the truth. Reeves noted that "Faced with an urgent need for information, we just want the truth. In response to the question ‘Which way to the emergency room?’, all that really matters is the accuracy of the response. But much of the time, it’s more important that a person is speaking truthfully than that they’re speaking the truth, especially when the answers are not yet clear. Most of us feel very differently towards the friend who makes an honest mistake, perhaps based on inadequate information, and the one who tells a deliberate lie."

May 2021

The human mind is designed to experience the world a certain way, and so it leads us to biases, prejudices, and heuristics. Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method, identified four of the most common of these, 400 years before our modern idea of "cognitive biases." If we are serious about finding truth, we ought to minimise these biases and use logic, science, and reason as much as possible, warned Big Think.

December 2020

Most modern societies place a high value on truth and honesty - but people can’t seem to resist falsehoods, from little white lies to vast conspiracy theories. In a podcast, Bill Gates and Rashida Jones attempted to answer a question that felt for many like it had taken on extra relevance during the pandemic year of 2020: why do people believe lies?
Politicians are increasingly hiring private companies to spread disinformation online, according to researchers who found campaigns run by third-party contractors targeting 48 different countries, The Oxford Internet Institute said the “disinformation-for-hire” market is booming, with advertising, marketing and public relations companies offering to manipulate online opinion for political parties and governments. The OII said private contractors help to identify which groups to target with messages, and then “prompt the trending of certain political messages” either through fake accounts or with armies of bots, or automated accounts, noted the Financial Times.

September 2020

The World Economic Forum warned that the coronavirus pandemic has given rise to many new conspiracy theories - and UNESCO wants to educate people to identify and debunk them. Certain groups are more prone to being targeted, including particular religions and people with different sexual orientation. Counter-actions include calling out false information, contacting the author, and taking care not to spread it further.
For New World, Same Humans, the way to beat QAnon and similar conspiracy theories, and the only future for progressive politics, is via difficult truths: about work, automation, nation states, and the future of our planet. We need a new story that confronts these realities, explains their meaning, and points towards a brighter tomorrow. The challenge is as simple as it is difficult. We need to find new ways to tell the truth.
Why do we lie? In one key respect, the psychoanalytic response to this question is broadly in line with other psychologies: we lie to evade the many and various unpleasant consequences of telling the truth. Lying to others can preserve us from the embarrassment of having values, tastes or desires that offend societal norms; lying to ourselves helps protect our favourable self-image. Beyond these defensive functions, lying can confer advantages over public and personal rivals and adversaries, in sex or business, art or politics. Lying also shields us from our vulnerability to our own unconscious desires, but also corrodes a shared reality. The liar wields the power to create their own reality free of uncertainty, according to Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University.

August 2020

In his book, When Maps Become the World, University of California, Santa Cruz philosopher and humanist Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther shows how the scientific theories, models and concepts we use to intervene in the world function as maps. We increasingly understand the world around us in terms of models, to the extent that we often take the models for reality. Winther explains how our representations in science become dominant social narratives - they become reality, and they can remake the world.

May 2020

Prospect Magazine warned that misinformation is nothing new. Foreigners and minorities have been slandered through history—often in the context of disease, and sometimes with murderous consequences. But “the difference now,” Sylvie Briand, director of Infectious Hazards Management at WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, told The Lancet, is that “with social media… this phenomenon is amplified, it goes faster and further.” The “huge change in the infrastructure of information,” says Amil Khan, a former government specialist who has studied misinformation in conflict zones, affects “not just the mechanics but the fundamental principles.” While, “for most of the modern era, information was filtered,” he says, today the filters are seriously eroded.

April 2020

When CB Insights published its report on disinformation, they titled it Memes That Kill: The Future Of Information Warfare. In it, they covered everything from deepfakes to bot armies. However the company warns that as dystopian as it might sound, that “future” is now. Nearly half of the people talking about Covid-19 on Twitter may have been bots, according to Carnegie Mellon research. Conspiracy theories regarding cures wererife in Facebook groups. These forms of online discourse fuelled real-life action, often with destructive consequences, ranging from vandalism of 5G towers to hate crimes against Asians to deaths from self-medication.

March 2020

Falsehoods can spread and mutate as quickly as a virus, creating a pandemic of misinformation that ranges from fake satellite images showing mass cremations of COVID-19 victims to claims that cocaine can kill the virus

September 2019

According to a report by researchers at Oxford University, governments are spreading disinformation to discredit political opponents, bury opposing views and interfere in foreign affairs. The researchers compiled information from news organisations, civil society groups and governments to create one of the most comprehensive inventories of disinformation practices by governments around the world. They found that the number of countries with political disinformation campaigns more than doubled to 70+, with evidence of at least one political party or government entity in each of those countries engaging in social media manipulation.

July 2019

Quartz believes Google-owned YouTube has a radicalisation problem. So does Reddit. Twitter is full of fake news. Facebook is flooded with disinformation. The low-paid moderators hired to stem the tide of false and vile content are burning out. And even if you want to ditch the tech giants altogether, good luck with that—their ad reach can follow you all over the internet. The web was created as an open exchange of information. Today, that dream often seems dead.

May 2019

Research released by Institute for the Future revealed how social and issue-focused groups are particularly susceptible to disinformation campaigns and can be targeted with computational propaganda, e.g. as they were during the US 2018 mid-term elections.
Chatham House asked whether we ready for deepfakes. These are fake videos in which a politician or a celebrity can be made to say whatever the hacker wants to put in their mouth. They are like fake news, but far more convincing. As we discuss in the next edition, deepfakes could cause civil strife or even war, but almost certainly they will reinforce distrust of online content, allowing everyone to deny the evidence of their eyes and pick their own truth.
The School of Life believes it would be a great deal more honest and a lot more liberating to accept that we do of course spend a lot of our lives lying in one way or another - and to grow generously sympathetic to, and curious about, the reasons why we do so. We have allowed ourselves to focus on the delinquent or semi-criminal aspects of lying, as though deceitfulness was always something that might happen in relation to a school teacher, an angry father, a gang or the police – and so we miss out on lying's more subtle everyday psychological varieties, such as denying hurt, guilt, tenderness, anxiety or sexuality.

December 2018

Deepfake is an AI-based technology used to produce or alter video content so that it presents something that didn't, in fact, occur. It can make it look as if anyone has said or done anything. Is it the next wave of (mis)information warfare, asked The Guardian?

October 2018

An IAI debate argued that in a post truth world, tribal consensus has seemingly replaced reason and evidence, and addressed the following key questions: Is this world of competing truths sustainable? Don't we need an agreed framework of thought in order to avoid a deeply fragmented and confrontational society? Can we retain reason and evidence whilst giving up on universal and objective truth? Or must there be truth in some form after all?
Our minds often prefer righteousness over truth, according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

September 2018

Many despise the arrival of a post-truth world and fear politicians who blatantly manipulate facts and peddle falsehoods. But does this rely on assuming that truth is objective and falsehoods can be simply identified, asked the Institute of Art and Ideas? Does the demise of truth mark the end of centuries of progress? Or is truth a construct of the powerful and post-truth a revolution against elites?
China’s internet police received 6.7 million reports of illegal or false information in July, according to official data reported by GZEROMedia. Chinese laws dictate that “rumor-mongers” can be charged with defamation and sentenced to up to seven years in prison.

August 2018

The rise of a "post-truth" world, where tribal politics and emotion rule, has left many troubled. For we usually assume reason is a better guide to action than feeling. Critics though argue reason is a veneer to hide motive and emotional politics is a vital challenge to the powerful. Should we celebrate a return to honest emotion or must we silence the irrational to save us from chaos? An Institute of Ideas debate analysed this emerging post-truth world.
Asserting belief in the face of contradicting facts rejects the pursuit of truth, claimed Aeon, arguing that belief is not knowledge. Beliefs are factive: to believe is to take to be true.
In a world where Donald Trump declares an audio recording of his statements “fake news” and insists to supporters that “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” it’s easy to despair for the truth, cautioned Quartz. “We have entered an age of post-truth politics,” lamented the New York Times.
However, Simon Blackburn, philosophy professor at Cambridge University, isn’t worried. Blackburn, who received acclaim for his 2005 book Truth and has recently written another book on the subject, On Truth, says the truth has always been twisted by politicians.
As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it,” writes historian Yuval Noah Harari, arguing that post-truth world is modus operandi for Homo sapiens.
Humans are a post-truth species, claimed Quartz, arguing that Homo sapiens have thrived by creating and sharing fake news to unite the collective.
A recent book examined how truth and reason have become endangered species and their rarity threatens the future of our public discourse, politics and governance. Nor is this an new pheniomenon: in the same vein, Hannah Arendt’s 1967 work Truth and Politics distinguished between the non-political sphere, where a singular truth reigns, and the political sphere where truth is plural and factual.

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