The Trump Era, Fake News, and The Epistemic Stroop Effect

The Stroop Effect occurs in a mismatch of word with color.  You are told to say the color of a word but its letters spell a different color. Repeatedly subjects react slower to a mismatch than they do to a match of color with word. For your own experience of the Stroop Effect take the "test" below.

Now notice how much more easily and quickly you can match and pronounce the colors below.

These colors do not require scrutiny.  The words and colors fit what your brain expects. This provides an example of the default mode for how we process the world.  Our brains do not like anything not fitting our preconceptions. Natural selection evolved brains to survive, not reason with the world. They fitted things into ready categories so our ancestors could avoid a tiger they saw lurking behind a boulder, even though the tiger was there only once and they had detoured around the rock scores of times since. The simple equation was rock=danger and brain neurons became wired for that. It made life easier.  So brains do the same today.

This effect is noteworthy in a post-modern era when fake news and alternative facts have become widely acceptable.  It helps explain why people believe what they want to believe.
A different kind of Stroop Effect is the Epistemic Stroop Effect.

The Epistemic Stroop Effect also supports Confirmation Bias, in which people selectively choose evidence to confirm their political or other position, and The Scientific Impotence Excuse, where the methodology of research can be challenged. The ready example is climate change. As one instance, people find insufficient evidence in brief newspaper articles to believe it is human-caused, which leads them to discount the claim. They then fall back on a view that science really can't predict the future, which also neatly fits their Confirmation Bias.

In an experiment demonstrating the Epistemic Stroop Effect, a team led by Michael Gilead at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev presented subjects with various opinions laced with grammatical errors. Participants were tasked to quickly indicate whether the grammar was correct.  But if participants agreed with the opinion, they were more ready to identify its statements as grammatically correct. When they disagreed they were more ready to notice grammatical errors.  They did not do it intentionally, consciously. Their brains did it for them, focusing more on whether the opinion was congenial or uncongenial and less on the assigned task of finding grammatical mistakes. Gilead's team wrote “their demonstration of such a knee-jerk acceptance of opinions may help explain people’s remarkable ability to remain entrenched in their convictions.”

From the evidence of such experiments we find that the human brain is not hard-wired to reason things out. We know that people accept fake news as it fits their world view, which they do not want disturbed, but these examples help explain why.  They also help explain why citizens agree with Donald Trump when he calls the media fake news.

Decades ago in Germany Josef Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister, said “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. . . . truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

 As yet, we have a free press uncontrolled by the State but, when the President of The United States charges as lies any journalism he doesn't like and fake news has proliferated with its true believers, we have entered strange new territory.  Let us hope this country has not started down a slippery slope.