The Confirmation-Bias-Based Community

On this week's On the Media, Brooke Gladstone interviews Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. They discuss how humans filter out undesirable facts. And they talk about how our new media culture reinforces this tendency.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You use examples from... decades ago to illustrate selective exposure and selective interpretation, but you contend in your book that these are really manifestations of the current media world of blogs and talk radio and email.

FARHAD MANJOO: Yeah. And in this world, there is the front door, the big newspapers and big network news outlets. The side doors are the blogs, talk radio, cable news, which actually draws a very small audience.

These side doors allow us to kind of amplify these factors of selective exposure and selective interpretation, and they make these factors kind of more important today than they were in the past, because in the past, you couldn't really seek out media that comported with your beliefs because, well, there weren't that many media choices...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you show how false facts on both the right and the left make their way through partisan echo chambers, but you do suggest that conservatives have a different relationship with their media.

FARHAD MANJOO: Right. People have studied how conservative blogs, for instance, link to each other and how liberal blogs link to each other, and they found that the people on the right generally have a tighter network and are more likely to indulge in only those sources.

And this has been a longstanding pattern where psychologists have noticed that people on the right are more efficient at filtering out things that kind of don't really support their views.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: We all know it's really easy to manipulate audio, video, and especially with Photoshop and digital images. But it was interesting – you said that the biggest effect of the Photoshopification of our society is not that it's easier to fool people but that now they have even more reason not to believe the evidence of their eyes and ears if they don't want to.

FARHAD MANJOO: If you live in a world where everything is possibly fake, where every photo you see could have been Photoshopped, it gives you license to dismiss that photo. This is true not only of photos but of basically all kind of documentary evidence that comes at us these days. We can always assume that there's been some digital foul play there and that it's possibly not a truth.

Evolution and Suicide Terror

Drawing from a variety of studies, evolutionary psychologist Andy Thomson has developed a hypothesis of suicide terrorism. He says we can understand three aspects behind the motivation:

• The capacity for male-bonded coalitionary violence against innocents is as old as our species and may date to our common ancestry with chimpanzees.

• The capacity for suicide exists in men and women alike. It is not necessarily the product of illness. Some suicides are the product of depression and social rejection. Other suicides are an attempt at "retaliation bargaining" waged from a position of powerlessness -- to force change from an enemy.
• Our evolved mechanisms which make us vulnerable to religious beliefs are the same mechanisms which can be exploited to motivate suicide terrorism. Thomson asserts that religion, more than any other ideology, is able to hijack our capacity for male coalitionary violence and suicide.

Thomson discusses his theory in the latest podcast of Humanist Network News. He also presented his findings at the Atheist Alliance International conference in September. Thomson's paper on the subject [Word Document].

The podcast also touches on the work of Robert Pape, author of the book, "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism"

They also discuss an interesting common denominator among male suicide terrorists -- immaturity and inexperience with sexuality.

This aspect of terrorism was identified years ago by comedian Marc Maron.

The Legacy of War of the Worlds

This coming Halloween will mark the 70th anniversary of Orson Welles' radio-vérité broadcast of "War of the Worlds." Radiolab just posted an outstanding podcast of the "War of the Wolds" legacy. Why did it fool people then? And why does it continue to fool people?

First they look at the context of the times -- the recent destruction of the Hindenberg and the new media form of the day which is now part of our mental furniture. It starts, "We interrupt this program..." As Hitler continued his attacks throughout Europe, special bulletins became an authoritative and attention-getting feature of radio -- a feature Welles exploited. Tellingly, many of the listener's fooled by Welles' broadcast believed that it was Germans attacking, rather than Martians.

Other radio stations have staged their own versions of "War of the Worlds" over the years. And again people were fooled. The most disastrous example is the profoundly ill-advised broadcast in the capital city of Ecuador, Quito. The Quito broadcast was produced without any warning to anyone. In fact, the producer planted fictitious stories of strange phenomena in the days preceding the broadcast -- to whip up paranoia. At the end of the evening, the radio station was set on fire by an angry mob. Six people died that night.

Buffalo's WKBW (my hometown and my favorite station in the 70's) first broadcast "War of the Worlds" in 1968 -- modernized and set in the Western New York landscape. The 1971 WKBW broadcast is available online. The page contains a link to the full show (with great opening music) plus a making-of video. The climax of the '71 broadcast has iconic TV news anchor Irv Weinstein reporting from a rooftop like Edward R. Murrow. Except Irv is reporting on an approaching robot. It's really quite brilliant.

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

Report about changes in children's play from NPR's Morning Edition.