Worth Reading – How Malinformation Tricks Your Brain
Given what I said about the amount of AI slop permeating our online world recently, this isn’t a good sign:
Humans cannot carefully dissect every claim we encounter; we simply do not have enough time or cognitive bandwidth. Instead, we rely on heuristics—mental shortcuts that save effort but introduce bias. If information comes from someone we trust, we’re more likely to believe it. Likewise, if we hear something repeatedly, we assume it’s socially accepted, which makes it seem more accurate.
https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/society/malinformation-ii
They define malinformation as a true fact taken out of context or presented in a way that implies something that isn’t true. One example I’ve seen recently is a number of people posting about how Japan made all childhood vaccines voluntary and saw its childhood death rate drop. Those are two facts that, presented side by side, seem to indicate something. Left out of those two statements is the fact that the vaccination rate went up after they made it voluntary, not down. To the point where almost every child gets the routine vaccinations.
The article above, however, makes it clear that our brains take shortcuts to make quick decisions. In doing so, the number of times we see something that isn’t true can impact whether we treat it as false or true. They say familiarity breeds contempt when it comes to other people, but maybe familiarity with shared information breeds acceptance, regardless of the truth.
That is frightening in a world where tens of thousands of posts can be created in minutes.
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