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Psypost reported on a study finding that people with heightened anxiety are more likely to believe in claims they read and share on social media. The study also found that much of our reasoning is based on whatever political party we identify with. This "partisan motivated reasoning" means that we, essentially, work backward to justify our previously held beliefs by accepting or ignoring information that aligns with what we already find to be credible or trustworthy.
Ideologically extreme Republicans were more likely to believe misinformation than ideologically extreme Democrats, but centrist Republicans were better at identifying misinformation than centrist Democrats.
This study helps paint the picture of our current misinformation landscape. It makes sense that we would be more willing to trust information from sources that we already find credible and worth reading. And this is precisely what the study finds. But this is not the whole picture regarding the growth of misinformation and conspiracy theories; there is another component.
A few weeks back, we shared a link to a Vanity Fair story taken from a chapter for Will Sommer's new book Trust the Plan about the rise and staying power of QAnon. The excerpt is worth reading, but Sommer's book helps to fill in the larger picture of the increase in misinformation and conspiracy theories. One through line in Sommer's book helps us understand this rise and might also tell us how to stop the spread.
Throughout Trust the Plan, Sommer discusses how many people who have fallen for Q have nothing tethering them to the world around them. Chapter 10, “When Dad Takes the Red Pill,” hits on this thread that Sommer has been building to. The chapter tells the story of what happens to the relationship between a father and son when QAnon takes root in the family's life. David, the father, talks to Sommer about his son, Nathan, and how Nathan came to believe in QAnon. David talks of how Nathan has always been prone to conspiratorial thinking. However, QAnon hooked Nathan when he had to move back in with his parents as an adult and lost connection to his relationships outside his parents. Nathan turned to his computer and the QAnon community to find those connections.
In this chapter, Sommer also mentions a psychiatrist in Maryland, Sean Heffernan, who started researching QAnon after seeing QAnon bumper stickers on the cars of wealthy soccer moms. Heffernan thought it was strange to see such a proliferation of QAnon members in the affluent suburbs of Maryland. Q believers had, to this point, typically been people on the fringes of society. But Heffernan thinks Q taking root in affluent areas involves people losing real-world relationships.
Sommer reaches this conclusion himself in chapter 13, “QAnon Goes Abroad,” where Sommer states, "QAnon reaches vulnerable people who feel dislocated in the modern world, assuring them that their lives have a greater meaning and that the people they dislike are inherently evil." This links back with the study PsyPost reports on, especially that heightened anxiety increases the chances people will share misinformation on social media.
Social media has undoubtedly made it easier to share conspiracies and misinformation, but we cannot blame them entirely for the rise of QAnon and other conspiracies. Instead, we must consider that we live in a time when people have heightened anxiety and are losing their real-world connections for many reasons.
This means the solution to our misinformation and conspiracy problem will not be throwing information at people because wrong information is a symptom of a more significant problem. Sommer's book makes clear what we have said before, but it bears repeating that the best way to combat conspiracies is two-fold:
1) Don't cut off relationships with people trapped in conspiratorial thinking.
2) Focus on the things you have in common, like sports, books, tv shows, or hobbies that have nothing to do with the conspiracy they focused on.
It can be hard to do this, as David mentions in Sommer's book, when your loved one is screaming at you about a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles, but the best way to care for those trapped in these patterns is still to love them out of it.
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