Fake News makes Perfect Sense

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We all have off days, right? Days when you aren’t quite yourself? I’m going to let you into a secret: nobody notices.

Back in the 1970s Stanley Milgram – yes, the electric shocks guy – was experimenting with ‘Cyranoids’. Cyranoids is a made-up word to describe people who - like the character from Cyrano De Bergerac on which the movie Roxanne was based - are speaking someone else’s words rather than their own.

So, for example, Milgram would give ear-pieces to children and adults and have an adult speak the words of a 12-year old (a bit like Tom Hanks in ‘Big’) or have people assess children speaking the words of a Harvard professor.

Pretty much nobody noticed.

That should unsettle you: possibly you live your entire life without anyone ever actually seeing or hearing well...'you'. It’s just one of a number of experiments that illustrate that to a large extent we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we want it to be. This ranges from ‘perceptual set’ at the awareness level, through to ‘confirmation bias’ at the cognitive level.

Today I saw this article on fake news (thanks to Harold Jarche) where the writer points out “People will share things even if they know it's not true, just because it fits with their values and what they believe in” and I thought ‘well, of course’.

Whilst there is a global shortage of people who understand the Affective Context model, we aren't short of practical applications in areas ranging from digital marketing to political influence. As Cambridge Analytica discovered, find out what people care about and you can predict and even control their behaviour.

Fake news works, because it reflects what we want to feel. We love memes (which encapsulate a popular sentiment) and we share them with other people who feel like us, so they can feel like we do too (also why we tell stories). Why does Donald Trump lie so much? Because he knows that what people want to feel is what really matters. Affective coherence. 

In itself, this is nothing new - throughout human history we have sought out things that confirmed the way we felt – only now we have the power to create them.

We used to feel bad about lying. But in a world where you can undermine authority, where you can say 'we are tired of experts' and 'YOU are FAKE NEWS!' nobody has to feel bad about anything. That's the secret: remove the authority. Now you can say whatever people want to hear.

Before you throw up your arms in horror, the world was already awash with views that exist only because they fit with what we want to feel – from the afterlife to learning styles.

Mainstream media allowed people in power to tell us how to feel. The internet allows us to feel however we want to feel, and the people in power to feed it.