Why Good People Share Fake News — And How To Make Them Stop

In Reality

It’s received wisdom today that tribalism, confirmation bias and other mental
errors are deeply embedded in human nature. And once social media began
exploiting these forces, truth didn’t stand a chance. Well, not so fast. Today’s
guest is David Rand, professor of management and brain and cognitive
sciences at MIT. To cite a very incomplete list of his accolades, he has been
recognized by the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarship;
the Poynter Institute, which named him fact-checking researcher of the year,
and just this past fall by the Thinkers 50 Radar List. His research bridges
cognitive science, behavioral economics and social psychology, and from
that vantage, he argues that consumers of media have more free will than you
might think and that there are ways out of our information dystopia. Dave
and I will cover the role of distraction in the spread of misinformation, how
fact-checking might actually scale, and why Americans are actually receptive
to other points of view, if you just give them a chance.

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Produced by Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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