Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, "Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

Nov 6, 2023

Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young explores the manipulation of social identities by political leaders and media organizations. She discusses how individuals are motivated to seek misinformation that aligns with their needs for comprehension, control, and community. The chapter also explores the vulnerability and honesty of a story compared to a diagram, and the influence of reasoning and previous experiences on our actions and decisions. It also highlights the correlation between evangelical Christianity and the Republican party, as well as the dynamics between black Americans and evangelical churches. The speakers examine the relationship between media, politics, and identity, and discuss strategies to counteract misinformation and improve the media and political landscape.

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INSIGHT

Three Motivations Behind Belief

People crave information that satisfies comprehension, control, and community more than strict accuracy.
That drive can produce empirically false beliefs even without direct exposure to deliberate falsehoods.

ANECDOTE

Personal Conspiracy Spiral And Rescue

Dannagal described falling into conspiratorial rabbit holes after her husband's brain tumor diagnosis and then being pulled out by friends' caring actions.
Their practical support replaced conspiracy-driven comprehension with community-focused action.

INSIGHT

Why Everyday Reasoning Avoids Falsification

Everyday epistemology blends inductive and deductive reasoning in routine choices.
Science's falsification ethic conflicts with daily survival heuristics, explaining why we rarely seek to disprove our beliefs.

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Over the past 40 years, lawmakers in America's two major political parties have taken increasingly extreme positions on ideological issues. Voters from the two parties have become increasingly distinct and hostile to one another along the lines of race, religion, geography, and culture. In Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young illustrates how political leaders and media organizations capitalize on social and cultural identities to separate, enrage, and mobilize people. Because humans are motivated to comprehend, to feel in control, and to be part of a community, they seek information that satisfies these needs – including misinformation that favors their political team. They don’t want to be wrong.

Bringing together tools from political science, communications, and social psychology, Dr. Goldthwaite Young creates a model to explain how public officials, journalists, and social media platforms encourage what she calls identity distillation. Dr. Young both describes the dynamics and provides suggestions for how to disrupt “identity-driven wrongness.” These include journalists abandoning conflict framing in the coverage of politics, social media platforms increasing transparency about their algorithmic content rankings and ad targeting, and individuals cultivating intellectual humility and disrupting performances of political identity to increase the demand for democracy-centered political information.

Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of Communications and Political Science at the University of Delaware. Her areas of expertise include political media effects, media psychology, public opinion, and the psychology of misinformation. I’m delighted to welcome her to the New Books Network.

George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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