December 8, 2018

Why You Need More Than Facts to Fight Misinformation

Here's your challenge. You have just read a report from a conservative think tank that claims that people living in poverty aren't doing so badly because they have microwaves and fridges, televisions, and even air conditioners, and are committing fraud by improper purchases with food stamp benefits. It's an outrageous claim. You're fuming. AND you need to respond, professionally.

What do you do?

First thought is probably to fight with facts. You'll craft an op-ed or a press release that shows what the truth of the matter is. You'll take down their claims with accurate data - the invalidity of claims of welfare fraud, the increasing numbers of working poor families, the measly monthly benefit from food stamps, etc. If they see the real facts, there's no debate, right?

Wrong, actually. As a preponderance of evidence shows (see How Facts Backfire for a review), rebutting with facts can actually make your opposition dig their heels in deeper and stay put, more confident than ever in their views.

How can this be true? For two reasons, primarily, that I am about to oversimplify beyond belief.

First, we're not passive recipients of all the "data" that the world provides. We are actively making meaning from these data. We rely on what psychologists call "schema," or conceptual categories that help us interpret new or novel information. For example, I have a Great Dane, Lorenzo, and toddlers often point to him and say, "Horsey! Horsey!" Because of his enormous size, the "data" of Lorenzo activates their "horse" schema, not their "dog" schema.

Second, we are what political psychologists call "motivated reasoners" (For a great, accessible review see Chris Mooney's piece, The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science). Simply put, we seek out information that confirms our beliefs, and write-off what doesn't. We don't like to be wrong - it's very threatening to our desire for consistency and cognitive efficiency!

Further, denying false claims requires you to repeat those false claims, which serves to reinforce them. Our brains are funny that way. The more we hear a particular argument, the more accessible it becomes, and we regularly mistake what is accessible for what is TRUE. Think about the number of scientifically or factually disproven assertions that many people still believe: That there's widespread voter fraud; that climate change is not real; that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11.

So, the more you're in the public discourse saying, "welfare fraud is a myth," the more you reinforce the notion that there is welfare fraud. You might rile up your base of low-income advocates, but you won't convert the unconverted.

What to do, then? You need to think about fighting the real fight, not the data fight. You have to fight the "schema" fight, if you will. So if you want to tell the real story of the working poor in your state, here's a strategy:

  1. Tell a story about what work pays, as opposed to what workers earn. It may seem a subtle point, but when the frame is about what is possible in our state's economy, then that is about all of us. When instead you focus on what workers earn, or what benefits amount to, you leave your audience to consider what else that worker could do to earn more, or what that benefit recipient could do to reduce spending and save (and they will consider this).
  2. Once you have established the broader, structural frame of work and not worker, or the economy and not the poor, find data that support that frame. This is unlikely to be decontextualized poverty rates, rates of uninsurance, food stamp or Medicaid benefits. It is more likely to be data that show trends in employment in your state with comparative wages AND what the relationship is to costs of living (affordable housing, child care, transportation, health care premiums, food, etc).
  3. If you MUST make reference to the original myth or falsehood, put it in what George Lakoff call's a "truth sandwich." First state the facts, then indicate what the myth is, and then reinforce the facts.

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