The Misinformation Age

How False Beliefs Spread

By: Cailin O’Connor, James Owen Weatherall

Narrated by: Chelsea Stephens

The social dynamics of "alternative facts": why what you believe depends on who you know

Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O'Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false belief. It might seem that there's an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that's right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not?

In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.

©2019 Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall (P)2019 Tantor

Stunningly good and important

Stunningly good and important book. Concise and very well done. Highly recommended. Worth reading if you are interested in the problems of propaganda, fake news, and how science can be mischaracterized.

Essential Reading for the 21st Century

This was a fantastic book that made complicated statistical subjects easily accessible to people who might not be familiar with statistics.

I consider this book a must read for anyone who engaged with social media or had an interest in how misinformation and propaganda works in the modern era. This book should honestly be taught to all high school and college students, I view it as that essentially.

Recommended. An Unbiased Account of Disinformation Campaigns

This is the fifth book I've listened to on the subject. Two were overly biased. Two were decent but could have been condensed. This is the only one that I would emphatically recommend.

This book is largely descriptive and focuses, without loss of generality, on the context of science and science-informed policy.

Helpful and insightful

Overall I liked this book. It’s themes were well laid out and easy to understand. I thought the examples were great and helped demonstrate the authors’ points. It was great all the way up to the last 5 minutes when, offering solutions, they proposed some radical ideas that, if enough time has been spent in details there, could have come across more credible.

However, I would recommend this book as it does get to the point of how and why misinformation starts and spreads and how we need to hold society accountable.

Veritas!

Professors O’Connor and Weatherall make clear that we are all influenced by the people in our network. No matter how rational we consider ourselves to be, false beliefs inevitably creep in from the people we trust. It is nearly impossible for any of us to fully scrutinize the information we consume.

But there is hope. My big takeaway from this book is that we are much more likely to have true beliefs if the primary sources of information are carefully calibrated to the scientific community.

Another big takeaway is that it is much easier to change a person’s view if you share their core values and are trusted by them.

Conformity bias and social cost is also important to understand when trying to change another persons view. Most people naturally conform to the views of their social circles. To break from those most closely held views could come at the cost of the loss of friends and even family members. Hence, many people will choose to hold on to false beliefs for the sake of conforming to the views of their friends and family members and those is their social media networks.

Great book and highly recommended.