How to Trust Your Brain Online

Co-hosts Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez explore the web’s effects on our brains and how narrative, repetition, and even a focus on replaying memories can muddy our ability to separate fact from fiction. How do we come to believe the things we do? Why do conspiracy theories flourish? And how can we train our brains to recognize misinformation online? Lisa Fazio, an associate psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, explains how people process information and disinformation, and how to debunk and pre-bunk in ways that can help discern the real from the fake.

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Andrea Valdez: When I was growing up, I always believed that bluebonnets, which are the Texas state flower where I live, that they’re illegal to pick in Texas. And this is something that I feel like so many people very firmly believe. You hear it all the time: You cannot pick the state flower, the bluebonnet. And come to find out when I was an adult that there actually is no state law to this effect. I was 100 percent convinced of this as a fact. And I bet if you poll an average Texan, there’s going to be probably a healthy contingent of them that also believe it’s a fact. So sometimes we just internalize these bits of information. They kind of come from somewhere; I don’t know where. And they just, they stick with you.

Megan Garber: Oh, that’s so interesting. So not quite a false memory, but a false sense of reality in the present. Something like that. Wow. And I love it too, because it protects the flowers. So hey, that’s great. Not a bad side effect.

Valdez: Yeah.

Garber: Not a bad side effect.

Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.

Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic.

Valdez: And this is How to Know What’s Real.

Garber: Andrea, you know, lots of mistakes like that are commonly shared. One of them I think about sometimes involves Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, who a lot of people became convinced that he had died in the 1980s, when he was in prison. But of course he didn’t die in the 1980s. He died in 2013. But the misconception was so common that researchers began to talk about the quote unquote “Mandela effect” to describe, I think, what we’re talking about: these false memories that somehow become shared and somehow become communal. And they’re often really low-stakes things. You know, like how many people remember the line from Star Wars? I hope this is not a spoiler, but the line from Star Wars isn’t “Luke, I am your father”—which is definitely what I thought the line was.

Valdez: Of course. Everybody does.

Garber: Yeah. But do you know what it is, actually? Because it’s not that.

Valdez: I do know what it is, but only because I feel like this has come up so much that people have the wrong idea. It’s “No, I am your father.”

Garber: Yeah, exactly; there’s no “Luke,” which is such a small distinction and so tiny in one way, but it’s also kind of humbling to think how that mistake just kind of took over the reality and how it took on a life of its own.

Valdez: There’s something actually innocent about getting things wrong. In casual conversation, you might say something wrong, and it’s okay; we all do it. But I think the forgiveness comes because the information trail you’re creating goes cold pretty quickly. Maybe you have a “cookie aunt” who tells you something when you’re a kid, and you just accept that it’s fact, and then maybe you take that cookie-aunt fact and you repeat it to a friend. And then it kind of just stops there, right? It doesn’t get passed along and along. But we live in a world right now where it feels like there’s rampant, never-ending misinformation, and with the internet and the sharing culture that we have on social media, this misinformation, it goes viral. And then it’s as if we’re all sick with the same misinformation.

Garber: And sickness is such a good metaphor. And one that scientists are using often, too. They compare bad information to bad health. Like you said, a virus that spreads from person to person, as a contagion. And the fact that it’s so easily transferable makes it really hard to fight off. And I wanted to understand a little bit more about that dynamic. And really about … what happens in our brains as we try to sort out the true information from the false.

Dr. Lisa Fazio is an expert on how our minds process information. I asked her more about how we come to believe—and how we end up holding on to incorrect information.

Lisa Fazio: So the short answer is in the same ways that we learn correct information. So the same principles of learning and memory apply. What’s different with incorrect stuff is: Sometimes we should have the knowledge to know that it’s wrong, and sometimes that means that we can avoid learning incorrect stuff. And sometimes that means we actually don’t notice the contradiction, and so we remember it anyways.

Garber: Could you tell me a bit more about the distinctions there, and how the new information interacts with the knowledge we already have?

Fazio: My favorite example of this is something that we call the Moses illusion. So you can ask people, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?” And almost everyone will respond, “Two.” But! Once you actually pointed out to him that it was Noah and not Moses who took the animals on the ark, everyone goes, “Oh, of course; I knew that.” So that knowledge is in your head, but you’re not using it in the moment. So we’ve been calling this “knowledge neglect”: that you’ve got it stored in memory someplace, but in the moment you fail to use that knowledge and you instead learn this incorrect information.

Garber: Oh, that’s so interesting. What do you attribute that to?

Fazio: It really seems to be that when things are close enough, we don’t flag them as wrong. So if I asked you, “How many animals of each kind did Reagan take on the ark?”—you won’t answer that question. You’ll notice the error there. And it actually makes a lot of sense in our day-to-day lives when we’re talking to each other. We make speech errors all the time, but to have a conversation, we don’t point each one out. We just keep going.

Garber: So why, then, can we be so sure that we are correct?

Fazio: I think it’s one of the most fascinating things about our memory system that we can have these times that we are absolutely certain that we have seen this thing, we have experienced this thing, and it’s just not true. And I think part of it is that we often think about our memories for events as being kind of video cameras—that, like, we’re just recording the event. And then when it’s time to recall it, we play it back.

Garber: Huh.

Fazio: And that’s not at all how it happens. Instead, what you remember is partially what parts of the event were important enough for you to pay attention to, for you to encode.

Garber: And do we encode certain types of information differently from others?

Fazio: Memory researchers sometimes talk about the difference between what we call episodic memory and semantic memory, where episodic memory is your memory for events, your kind of autobiographical memory, versus semantic memory, [which] is just kind of all the stuff that you know about the world. So the sky is blue, my name is Lisa—all the just kind of general facts and things that we know.

And I will say, there’s argument in the field: Are these actually different memory systems, or is it just one that’s remembering two types of material? There’s some evidence—from kind of brain lesions, and some neuropsychology—that they are separate systems. But then there’s also evidence that, really, it’s all the same thing.

Garber: And where does fiction fit into that? How do our brains make sense of the difference between … the real facts and the fictional ones? Or does it?

Fazio: So there’s interesting work trying to figure out when we’re thinking about fiction, do we kind of compartmentalize it and think of it as something separate from our knowledge about the real world? And it seems to be that that’s not really what happens. So there’s much more blending of the two, and you really keep them straight more by kind of remembering that one is Lord of the Rings, and one is reality. But they can blend in interesting ways. So we have studies where we’ve had people read fictional stories. We tell them they’re fictional. We warn them that, “Hey, authors of fiction often take liberties with certain facts or ideas in order to make the story more compelling. So some of what you read will be false.” And then we have them read a story that contains a bunch of true and false facts about the world. And then later that day, or a few weeks later, we just give them a trivia quiz where we ask them a bunch of questions and see what they answer. And what they read in those stories bleeds over. So even though they knew it was fictional, it sometimes affected their memory, and they would recall what was in the story rather than what they knew to be correct kind of two weeks earlier.

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Valdez: So Dr. Fazio is saying a couple of things. One, sometimes we can inadvertently create false memories for ourselves. We play back a memory in our head, but we have an incomplete picture of that memory, so maybe we insert some additional, not-quite-right details to flesh the memory back out, which ends up distorting the memory.

And then there’s our memories about facts about the world. And sometimes we’re recalling those facts from all sorts of information we’ve stored in our brain. And the fictional or false stuff can mix in with the real and accurate information.

Garber: You know, I’ve been thinking a lot, too, about all the efforts experts have made to distinguish between the different types of bad information we’re confronted with. So there’s misinformation: a claim that’s just generally incorrect. And then there’s disinformation, with a D, which is generally understood to be misinformation that’s shared with the intention to mislead. So misinformation would be if someone who doesn’t know much about Taylor Swift messes up and keeps telling people she’s been dating … Jason Kelce. When in fact, it’s his brother, Travis Kelce.

Valdez: And disinformation would be if I knew that was wrong, but then I turned around and purposely told my friend, a big football fan, that Jason and Taylor are dating, to mess with him.

Garber: Exactly! And then there’s propaganda. So: if a troll kept posting that the whole Taylor/Travis relationship is a psyop designed to promote a liberal agenda. Which was … a real claim people made!

Valdez: Yeah; I can see how this is confusing for folks. They’re all so similar, and hard to disentangle. You know, we have all of these ways to categorize these different errors. But are we really able to discern between all of these subtle distinctions? Sure, we can intellectualize them….but can we really feel them?

Garber: That’s such a good question. And something I was thinking about, too, as I talked with Dr. Fazio. And one answer might be that intellectualizing those questions could also be a way to feel them—where just being aware of how our brains are processing new information might give us that extra bit of distance that would allow us to be more critical of the information we are consuming. And I talked more with Dr. Fazio about that, and asked her advice on how we could foster a more cognition-aware approach.

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Garber: I know you’ve talked about the difference between debunking misinformation and pre-bunking, and I love that idea of pre-bunking. Can you talk a little bit about what that is, and what it achieves?

Fazio: Yeah, so debunking is when people have been exposed to some type of false information and then you’re trying to correct their memory. So: They’ve had an experience, they likely now believe something false, and you’re trying to correct that. And we find that debunking, in general, is useful; the problem is it never gets you back to baseline. Having no exposure to the misinformation is always better than the debunk. Seeing a debunk is better than nothing; even better would be just no exposure to the misinformation. [What] pre-bunking interventions try to do is to kind of prepare you before you see the misinformation.

Garber: Okay.

Fazio: So sometimes this is done with something that’s often called inoculation—where you warn people about the types of manipulative techniques that might be used in misinformation. So using really emotional language, false “experts,” trying to kind of increase polarization. Things like that. But then you can also warn people about the specific themes or topics of misinformation. So, like: “In this next election, you will likely see a story about ballots being found by a river. In general, that ends up being misinformation, so just keep an eye out for that. And know that if you see a story, you should really make sure it’s true before you believe it.”

Garber: And along those lines, how would you make sure that it’s true? Especially with our memories working as they do, how do we even trust what seems to be true?

Fazio: Yeah; so I tell people to pay attention to the source. Is this coming from someplace that you’ve heard about before? The best way, I think, is multiple sources telling you that.And one of the things I also remind people of is, like: In the fast-moving social-media environment, if you see something and you’re not sure if it’s true or false, one thing you can do is—just don’t share that. Like, don’t continue the path forward. Just pause. Don’t hit that share button, and try and stop the chain a little bit there.

Garber: If you see something, don’t say something.

Fazio: Exactly. There we go. That’s our new motto. “See something, don’t say something.”

Garber: And do you find that people are receptive to that? Or is the impulse to share so strong that people just want to anyway?

Fazio: Yeah. So people are receptive to it generally. So when you remind people that, “Hey, Americans really care about the accuracy of what they hear. They want to see true information on their social-media feeds.” And that they’ll kind of block people that constantly post false information. We’ve got some studies showing that people do respond to that, and are less willing to share really false and misleading headlines after those types of reminders.

Garber: Could you tell me more about emotion and how it resonates with our brains?

Fazio: So Dr. Jay Van Bavel has some interesting work, along with some colleagues, finding that “moral emotional words”—so, words that can convey a lot of emotion, but also a sense of morality—those really capture our attention. Yeah. And lead to more shares on social media.

Garber: That’s so interesting. Do they offer an explanation for why that might be?

Fazio: Our brains pay a lot of attention to emotion. They pay a lot of attention to morality. When you smoosh them together, then it’s this kind of superpower of getting us to just really focus in on that information. Which is another cue that people can use. If something makes you feel a really strong emotion, that’s typically a time to pause and kind of double-check: “Is this true or not?”

Garber: And along those lines, you know, media literacy has been offered sometimes as an explanation, or as a solution. You know: Just if the public were a little bit more educated about the basics of how news-gathering works, for example, that maybe they would be even more equipped to do all the things that you’re talking about. You know, and to be a little bit more suspicious, to question themselves. How do you feel about that idea? And how do you feel about news literacy as an answer? One answer among many?

Fazio: Yeah; I mean, I think that’s the key point—that it’s one answer among many. I think there are no silver bullets here that are just going to fix the problem. But I do think media literacy is useful.

I think one thing it can be really useful for is increasing people’s trust of good news media.

Garber: Mm. Yeah. Yeah.

Fazio: Because one of the things we often worry about, with misinformation, is that we’ll just make people overly skeptical of everything. Become kind of this nihilistic: “Nothing is true; I can’t tell what’s true or false, so I’m just going to check out and not believe anything.” And we really want to avoid that. So I think an important role of media literacy can be understanding: “Here’s how journalists do their jobs, and why you should trust them. And all the steps they go through to make sure that they’re providing correct information.” And I think that can be a useful counterpart.

Garber: And what are some of the other factors that affect whether or not we’re more likely to believe information?

Fazio: Yeah, so one of the findings that we do a lot of work on is that repetition, in and of itself, increases our belief in information. So the more often you hear something, the more likely you are to think that it’s true. And they’re not huge effects, but just, kind of, things gain a little bit of plausibility every time you hear them. So you can imagine the first time that people heard the Pizzagate rumor, that [Hillary] Clinton is molesting children in the basement of a pizza parlor in D.C. That seemed utterly implausible. There was no way that was happening. And the second time you heard it, the 10th time you’ve heard it, it becomes just slightly less implausible each time. You likely still don’t think it’s true, but it’s not as outrageous as the first time you heard it. And so I think that has a lot of implications for our current media environment, where you’re likely to see the same headline or the same rumor or the same false piece of information multiple times over the course of a day.

Garber: And it occurs to me, too, that repetition can also work the other way—as a way to solidify good information.

Fazio: Yeah. And we know that this same work that’s looked at the role of repetition also finds that things that are just easy to understand, generally, are also more likely to be believed. So there’s even some findings that rhyming sayings are thought to be a little more truthful than sayings that don’t rhyme. So anything that makes it easy to understand, easy to process, is going to be appealing.

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Valdez: Megan, a lot of what Dr. Fazio talked about reminds me of a process known as heuristics—which are these mental shortcuts we take when we’re presented with information, and we need to make quick decisions or conclusions or judgments. And actually, those mental shortcuts can be exploited. There’s a great article in Undark magazine about how our brains are inherently lazy and how that puts us at an informational disadvantage. And in it, the writer makes the point that simply using our brain requires a lot of energy. Like, literally: It requires calories, it requires glucose.

Garber: Oh, man, like fueling up for a race almost. You have to fuel up just to process the world.

Valdez: Right. And this article argues that as humans were evolving, we didn’t always know where our next meal was going to come from. So we would save some of that energy. So decisions and judgments were made really quickly, with survival first and foremost in mind.

Garber: Huh.

Valdez: And so cognition and critical thinking: Those are two things that require heavier mental lifting, and our brain really prefers to not lift heavy thoughts. And it’s probably part of the reason that we’re so easy to exploit, because we just often default to our lizard brain.

Garber: And that’s part of why conspiracy theories work so well, right? They take a world that’s really complicated and reduce it to something really simple—all these questions, with a single answer that kind of explains everything.

Valdez: And that’s a huge part of their appeal.

Garber: And it’s so interesting to think about, too, because one idea you hear a lot these days is that we’re living in a golden age of conspiracy theories. Or maybe like a fool’s-gold age, I guess. But I was reading more about that, and it turns out that the theories themselves actually don’t seem to be more prevalent now than they’ve been in the past. There was a 2022 study that reported that 73 percent of Americans believe that conspiracy theories are currently, quote unquote, “out of control.” And 59 percent agree that people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories, compared with 25 years ago. But the study couldn’t find any evidence, uh, that any specific conspiracy theories, or just general conspiracism, have actually increased over that time. So even our perception of misinformation is a little bit misinformed!

Valdez: That’s so fascinating. And it feels right!

Garber: Right! No, exactly—or wrong. Maybe. Who knows.

Valdez: Right, yes. The wrongness feels right.

Garber: And 77 percent blamed social media and the internet for their perception that conspiracies had increased. You know, that idea, it’s very hard to prove that out fully, but it does seem to have merit. Because it’s not just that we’re often wrong online, but it’s also that we just talk about the wrongness so much, and we’re so aware of the wrongness. So the environment itself can be a little bit misleading.

Valdez: And social media feels almost rudimentary to what’s coming with the AI revolution. If we already have a tough time distinguishing between real and fake, I imagine that is only going to get worse with AI.

Garber: Dr. Fazio, I wonder about how AI will affect the dynamics we’ve been talking about. How are you thinking about AI, and the effect it might have on how we know, and trust, the world around us?

Fazio: So, I go back and forth here, from, like, optimistic to really pessimistic. Okay. So the optimistic case is: We’ve dealt with changes before. So we had photography, and then we had Photoshop. And Photoshop was gonna ruin all of us; we’d never be able to tell when a photo was real or not. And that didn’t happen. We figured out ways to authenticate photos. We still have photojournalism. Photoshop didn’t kind of ruin our ability to tell what’s true or false. And I think a similar thing could be happening with generative AI. It could go either way, but there’s definitely a case to be made that we’ll just figure this out, um, and things will be fine. The pessimistic view is that we won’t be sure if what we’re seeing is true or false, and so we’ll disbelieve everything. And so you could end up in a spot where a video is released showing some sort of crime, and everyone can just say, “Well, that’s not real. It was faked.” And it can become a way to disregard actual evidence.

Garber: And at this moment, do you have a sense of which of those scenarios might win out?

Fazio: Yeah; so I will say we’re starting to see people do a little bit of the latter, where anytime you see anything: “Oh, that’s just not real. That’s faked.” And that worries me.

Garber: Yeah. And, I mean, how do you think about the sort of, you know, preemptive solutions? Like you said, you know, in previous iterations of this—with photography, with so many new technologies—people did find the answer. And what do you think would be our answer here if we were able to implement it?

Fazio: I mean, I think the answer, again, comes down to paying attention to the source of the information. I mean, so we just saw with the Kate Middleton picture that reputable news organizations, like AP, noticed the issue, and took the photo down. And I think it’s going to be on these organizations to really verify that this is actual video, and to become, a little bit, the gatekeepers there of kind of: “We trust this, and you should trust us.” And that’s going to require transparency, kind of: “What are you doing? Why should we trust you? How do we know this is real?” But I’m hoping that that type of relationship can be useful.

Garber: Thank you for the perfect segue to my next question! Which is: When it comes to news, in particular, how can we assess whether something is real? In your own life, how do you think about what, and who, to trust?

Fazio: Yeah. So I think one of the useful cues to what’s real is the sense of consensus. So, are multiple people saying it? And more importantly, are multiple people who have kind of knowledge about the situation? So not “multiple people” being random people on the internet, but multiple people being ones with the expertise, or the knowledge, or the first-hand experience. There’s a media-literacy strategy called lateral reading, which encourages people—that when you’re faced with something that you’re unsure if it’s true or false, that’s it’s counterproductive to dive into the details of that information. So, like, if you’re looking at a web page, you don’t want to spend a lot of time on that web page trying to figure out if it’s trustworthy or not. What you want to do is see: What are other people saying about that website? So, open up Wikipedia, type in the name of the news organization. Does it have, like, a page there? Or type in the name of the foundation. Is it actually, uh, funded by oil companies talking about climate change? Or is it actually a bunch of scientists? Figuring out what other people are saying about a source can actually be a really useful tool.

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Garber: Andrea, I find that idea of lateral reading to be so useful—on its own, as a way to decide for myself which pieces of information to trust, but also as a reminder that, when it comes to making those decisions, we have more tools at our disposal than it might seem.

Valdez: Right. And there is some comfort in having so many resources available to us. More sources can mean more context, a fuller understanding. But it cuts both ways. Taking in too much information is exactly what short-circuits our lizard brains. In fact, there’s a whole school of thought that flooding the zone with a lot of trash information is a way to confuse and control people.

Garber: Well. And it’s so useful to remember how connected those things—confusing people and controlling them—really are. When I hear the term misinformation, I automatically associate it with politics. But misinformation is a matter of psychology, too. People who study propaganda talk about how its aim, often, isn’t just to mislead the public. It’s to dispirit them. It’s to make them give up on the idea of truth itself—to get people to a place where, like that old line goes, “everything is possible, and nothing is true.”

Valdez: Oh. That IS dispiriting. It almost encourages a nihilistic or apathetic view.

Garber: And I wonder, too, whether those feelings will be exacerbated by the influx of AI-generated content.

Valdez: Yes! Like, with the rise of deepfakes, I think that’s going to challenge our default assumption that seeing is believing. Given the way that evolution has worked, and the evolution of our information ecosystem, maybe seeing is not enough. But if you want to fight that nihilism, it’s almost like you need to fight the evolutionary instinct of making quick judgments on a single piece of information that’s presented to you.

Garber: Yeah. And one way to do that may just be appreciating how our brains are wired, and remembering that as we make our way through all the information out there. Almost like a form of mindfulness. This idea that awareness of your thoughts and sensations is a crucial first step in kind of moving beyond our lizard-brain impulses. Just being aware of how our brains are processing new information might give us that bit of distance that allows us to be more critical of the information we’re consuming, images or otherwise.

Valdez: Right. Seeing tells you a part of the story. But telling yourself the most truthful story—it just takes work.

[Music.]

Garber: That’s all for this episode of How to Know What’s Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

[Music.]

Valdez: Next time on How to Know What’s Real:

Deborah Raji: The way surveillance and privacy works is that it’s not just about the information that’s collected about you. It’s like your entire network is now, you know, caught in this web, and it’s just building pictures of entire ecosystems of information. And so I think people don’t always get that. It’s a huge part of what defines surveillance.

Garber: What we can learn about surveillance systems, deepfakes, and the way they affect our reality. We’ll be back with you on Monday.