CHANGING MINDS — Some researchers run experiments on rats. Adam Berinsky, the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab, runs them on humans who believe rumors — or what we now call disinformation. Berinsky doesn’t use electrodes or mazes — just surveys and polls. And his research has led to conclusions that could inform the 2024 race and the sorts of voters that politicians should be tailoring their messaging towards. Namely, Berinsky has found that false beliefs can be successfully debunked — up to a point — and that we should be paying much more attention to a group of people often overlooked by politicians and pollsters: people who answer that they’re “not sure” about a topic in surveys. In his new book, “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It,” he examines attitudes toward both politics and health, both of which are undermined by distrust and misinformation in ways that cause harm to both individuals and society. Berinsky, who is also an MIT professor of political science, told Nightly in a recent conversation that a lot of misinformation comes not from random people tweeting but from leaders — the political elite. And in our hyperpartisan era, people come to understand that the candidate or politician they back has been lying – but stay loyal to them anyway. “We choose our teams,” he said. “If I’m a Democrat, then I listen to Democrats, and Republicans listen to Republicans. That doesn’t mean I’m a sheep. It just means that basically, I’m sort of someone who only tangentially cares about politics, and I’m going to look to people I trust, the experts.” “That’s the real danger of elites,” he added, whether it’s a politician making unproven charges or a quack hustling pricey dietary supplements as alternatives to vaccines or FDA-approved medicines. If the people “in whom ordinary citizens place their trust — if they subvert the truth by spreading that information, then that sometimes contaminates the whole system.” Berinsky’s study of rumors dates back to the Barack Obama “birther” era and the “death panels” — respectively, the false but persistent beliefs that Obama wasn’t born in the United States (and thus wasn’t a legitimate president) and that under Obamacare, government panels would decide whether old people would live or die. (A recent KFF survey found that a decade later, about 8 percent of people still believe there are death panels — and a whopping 70 percent are unsure.) All of us get what Berinsky calls “incidental exposure” to rumors, disinformation and misinformation, even if we aren’t the intended target. Not all of us swallow the disinformation whole-heartedly, but a lot of us end up uncertain. And that’s sort of the point; people spread disinformation to sow distrust, not just to make someone believe X or Y about a certain law or policy or medical intervention. One of Berinsky’s takeaways is that we need to pay more attention to people who tell pollsters or focus groups that they are “not sure” or “I don’t know” or “undecided.” That’s the very group that political analysts often focus on the least. But they are key in countering misinformation. The outreach to build confidence in the Covid-19 vaccine in 2021-22 proved that point. Relatively few hard-core anti-vaxxers changed their minds and got the shot. But a lot of the “I don’t know,” uncertain group did gain confidence and get vaccinated. So in the political sphere, it’s important to address the “uncertain” group about political misinformation, including stolen elections. That doesn’t mean that those who hold more firmly onto rumors or misinformation are a “lost cause,” he said. But getting even a small number to get a life saving vaccine or to abandon conspiracy theories about election tampering is a win, even if the win is modest. The good news, Berinsky said, is that false beliefs — in health and medicine — can in fact be debunked. The bad news is that the debunking is ephemeral. It goes away, sometimes over a period of months, sometimes in as little as a week. “We’ve learned that a lot of these things that we thought were effective, were effective in the moment, but then, over time, that effect fades,” he said. One effective debunker in health is the “surprise communicator.” For instance it was a Republican — the late Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia — who helped convince fellow Republicans that Obamacare had no death panels. Isakson knew because he had written the provision about voluntary doctor-patient conversations that had been so grossly distorted. Berinsky said we can only wonder what would have happened if former President Donald Trump had become that surprise communicator, and pushed a pro-vaccine message to his followers more consistently, even if a few of them heckled him. In politics, “surprise communicators” don’t resonate quite as well as in the health space, he said. Berinsky didn’t write a hopeful book and it wasn’t a hopeful conversation. But it wasn’t totally despairing either. There’s no magic bullet against rumors and lies but there are more and more ways of fighting them, and using all of them, consistently and over time, can make a difference. No tool will sway 10 or 20 percent of the disbelievers; it will be a few percent here, a few percent there. “We have to recalibrate,” he said, “how we define success.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s guest on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @JoanneKenen.
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