Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol

Beyond misinformation: Parallel universes in a post-truth world

Imagine a world in which it is not medical knowledge but a free-for-all “opinion market” on Twitter that determines whether a new vaccine against ebola is effective and safe. Although this dystopian scenario is, at the moment, just a possible future, there are signs that public discourse is evolving in this direction: Terms such as “post-truth” and “fake news”, largely unknown until 2016, have exploded into the media and into public discourse. I explore the implications of the growing abundance of misinformation in the public sphere, how it influences people, why people believe obvious falsehoods, and how to counter this malaise. I argue that misinformation in the post-truth era can no longer be considered a localized “error” that can be corrected with appropriate communication tools. Instead, I suggest that responses to the post-truth era must include technological solutions that incorporate psychological principles, an interdisciplinary approach that I describe as “technocognition.”

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Keywords: memory and cognition, decision making, computational modelling, misinformation and myths