Inbuilt gullibility
/Fake news may be exacerbating people’s inbuilt gullibility. A study published last year in Science, a journal, concluded that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth” and that this effect was especially strong for fake political news. Fake news provides voters with a smorgasbord of facts and lies from which to pick and choose.
ln 2004 Drew Westen of Emory University in Atlanta put partisan Republicans and Democrats into a magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner and found that lying or hypocrisy by the other side lit up areas of the brain associated with rewards; lies by their own side lit up areas associated with dislike and negative emotions. At no point did the parts of the brain associated with reason show any response at all. If voters’ judgments are rooted in emotion and intuition, facts and evidence are likely to be secondary.