CHANGING MINDS — Some researchers run experiments on rats. Adam Berinsky, the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab, runs them on humans who believe rumors — or what we now call disinformation.
Berinsky doesn’t use electrodes or mazes — just surveys and polls. And his research has led to conclusions that could inform the 2024 race and the sorts of voters that politicians should be tailoring their messaging towards. Namely, Berinsky has found that false beliefs can be successfully debunked — up to a point — and that we should be paying much more attention to a group of people often overlooked by politicians and pollsters: people who answer that they’re “not sure” about a topic in surveys.
In his new book, “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It,” he examines attitudes toward both politics and health, both of which are undermined by distrust and misinformation in ways that cause harm to both individuals and society.
Berinsky, who is also an MIT professor of political science, told Nightly in a recent conversation that a lot of misinformation comes not from random people tweeting but from leaders — the political elite. And in our hyperpartisan era, people come to understand that the candidate or politician they back has been lying – but stay loyal to them anyway.
“We choose our teams,” he said. “If I’m a Democrat, then I listen to Democrats, and Republicans listen to Republicans. That doesn’t mean I’m a sheep. It just means that basically, I’m sort of someone who only tangentially cares about politics, and I’m going to look to people I trust, the experts.”
“That’s the real danger of elites,” he added, whether it’s a politician making unproven charges or a quack hustling pricey dietary supplements as alternatives to vaccines or FDA-approved medicines. If the people “in whom ordinary citizens place their trust — if they subvert the truth by spreading that information, then that sometimes contaminates the whole system.”
Berinsky’s study of rumors dates back to the Barack Obama “birther” era and the “death panels” — respectively, the false but persistent beliefs that Obama wasn’t born in the United States (and thus wasn’t a legitimate president) and that under Obamacare, government panels would decide whether old people would live or die. (A recent KFF survey found that a decade later, about 8 percent of people still believe there are death panels — and a whopping 70 percent are unsure.)
All of us get what Berinsky calls “incidental exposure” to rumors, disinformation and misinformation, even if we aren’t the intended target. Not all of us swallow the disinformation whole-heartedly, but a lot of us end up uncertain. And that’s sort of the point; people spread disinformation to sow distrust, not just to make someone believe X or Y about a certain law or policy or medical intervention.
One of Berinsky’s takeaways is that we need to pay more attention to people who tell pollsters or focus groups that they are “not sure” or “I don’t know” or “undecided.” That’s the very group that political analysts often focus on the least. But they are key in countering misinformation.
The outreach to build confidence in the Covid-19 vaccine in 2021-22 proved that point. Relatively few hard-core anti-vaxxers changed their minds and got the shot. But a lot of the “I don’t know,” uncertain group did gain confidence and get vaccinated. So in the political sphere, it’s important to address the “uncertain” group about political misinformation, including stolen elections. That doesn’t mean that those who hold more firmly onto rumors or misinformation are a “lost cause,” he said. But getting even a small number to get a life saving vaccine or to abandon conspiracy theories about election tampering is a win, even if the win is modest.
The good news, Berinsky said, is that false beliefs — in health and medicine — can in fact be debunked.
The bad news is that the debunking is ephemeral. It goes away, sometimes over a period of months, sometimes in as little as a week.
“We’ve learned that a lot of these things that we thought were effective, were effective in the moment, but then, over time, that effect fades,” he said.
One effective debunker in health is the “surprise communicator.” For instance it was a Republican — the late Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia — who helped convince fellow Republicans that Obamacare had no death panels. Isakson knew because he had written the provision about voluntary doctor-patient conversations that had been so grossly distorted.
Berinsky said we can only wonder what would have happened if former President Donald Trump had become that surprise communicator, and pushed a pro-vaccine message to his followers more consistently, even if a few of them heckled him.
In politics, “surprise communicators” don’t resonate quite as well as in the health space, he said.
Berinsky didn’t write a hopeful book and it wasn’t a hopeful conversation. But it wasn’t totally despairing either. There’s no magic bullet against rumors and lies but there are more and more ways of fighting them, and using all of them, consistently and over time, can make a difference. No tool will sway 10 or 20 percent of the disbelievers; it will be a few percent here, a few percent there. “We have to recalibrate,” he said, “how we define success.”
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s guest on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @JoanneKenen.
— Capitol doc: McConnell tests show no evidence of seizure disorder, stroke, Parkinson’s: The Capitol’s top doctor told Mitch McConnell today that “there is no evidence” he suffered a stroke or has a seizure disorder following his public freeze in Kentucky last week. Capitol physician Brian Monahan outlined extensive outside medical evaluations of McConnell after the episode, in which the Senate minority leader stopped talking for roughly 30 seconds in a media availability. In a letter to McConnell, Monahan recommended “no changes in treatment protocols” for his recovery from a March fall that left the Kentucky Republican with a concussion.
— George Santos and aide appear to be discussing plea deals with feds: Rep. George Santos and his former campaign aide, both indicted by federal prosecutors, appear to be in plea talks with the government, according to court papers filed today. Prosecutors in the Santos case asked the judge overseeing the case to delay a court hearing set for Thursday because “the parties have continued to discuss possible paths forward in this matter.” They added: “The parties wish to have additional time to continue those discussions.”
— Appeals court limits special counsel’s effort to access Rep. Scott Perry’s phone: A federal appeals court panel has partially blocked efforts by special counsel Jack Smith to access the seized cell phone data of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), a key figure in Donald Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 presidential election. In a ruling that remains under seal, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals set aside part of a lower court’s decision that would have allowed Smith’s prosecutors to access much of the contents they sought from Perry’s phone. The FBI seized the device from Perry in August 2022, under a court-authorized search warrant, but has yet to access relevant documents and communications after Perry moved to prevent it, citing his legal privileges as a federal lawmaker and the authority of Congress to be free of interference from the executive branch.
— Biden books are still bombing: After the Trump gold rush for the book industry of the last few years, the Biden era has, so far, been a bust. And that’s not just the case for mainstream journalists accustomed to chronicling the presidency in book form. Conservative readers don’t appear all that interested in reading hundreds of pages about a president they think is senile.
WARNING SIGNS — President Biden is underperforming among nonwhite voters in New York Times/Siena College national polls over the last year, helping to keep the race close in a hypothetical rematch against Donald J. Trump, writes the New York Times.
On average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53 percent to 28 percent among registered nonwhite voters in a compilation of Times/Siena polls from 2022 and 2023, which includes over 1,500 nonwhite respondents. The results represent a marked deterioration in Mr. Biden’s support compared with 2020, when he won more than 70 percent of nonwhite voters.
BIDEN’S HAIL MARY — President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign says it’s airing a TV ad during the NFL’s opening game this Thursday between the Detroit Lions and the Kansas City Chiefs, and the advertisement touts the president’s economic record, reports NBC News.
This spot — which is part of the reelection campaign’s 16-week, $25 million ad buy — will run in the battleground markets of Phoenix (Arizona), Atlanta (Georgia), Detroit (Michigan), Las Vegas (Nevada), Raleigh (North Carolina), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) and Milwaukee (Wisconsin), as well as on national cable, the campaign says.
KINGMAKERS — Poland’s general election next month could be decided by a far-right party that entices voters with libertarian visions of a low-tax future by raining fake money during rallies. Its past pronouncements, however, carry a far darker message, write Jan Cienski and Wojciech Kość.
The Confederation party’s election program smacks of a “Mad Men” version of 1950s America.
“A barbecue, a family, a house, two cars, a safe Poland free of immigrants, free enterprise and a country that allows every working Pole to succeed,” said Michał Urbaniak, a party leader from the northern city of Gdańsk.
Upending the status quo should happen by deregulating life as much as possible, Confederation says in its manifesto titled “The Constitution of Freedom.” That’s a message that’s supposed to appeal not only to an old guard of hard-rightists but also to a younger libertarian set, including students.
It calls for simplifying and lowering taxes, making the health care system rely on “market competition” thanks to giving people an annual coupon worth 4,000 złoty ($955) and a frequent use of the veto in EU negotiations to rein in what the party says is Brussels’ insatiable appetite to expand its powers, such as by imposing an “ideological climate policy.”
The party wants to liberalize access to firearms and ban abortion, including in cases of rape. It also grumbles about the burden placed on Poland by millions of Ukrainians fleeing the war and demands that Kyiv be held to account for wartime massacres of Poles by Ukrainian guerillas.
Fundamentally, Confederation promises to break with the two parties that have dominated Polish politics for more than two decades — the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party led by Jarosław Kaczyński that’s now in power, and the liberal Civic Coalition headed by former Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
DOG DAYS OF SUMMER — In American cities, dogs are everywhere: in parks, inside restaurants and bars, strutting down sidewalks. In Washington, some of the most famous dogs in the world — Joe Biden’s — have caused problems at the White House by attacking Secret Service members. For Mother Jones, Abigail Weinberg looked into the state of dog culture in cities and what dog owners and non-dog owners alike want out of pets in an urban environment, along with some suggestions for Biden about his dogs.
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