Many people spend a lot of time on political news. But in recent years, and especially this year, with the upcoming elections in many Western democracies, it has become even more pronounced.
Psychological findings about how the brain processes information can help us understand the differences in how people on different ends of the political spectrum react to and “digest” news. While much has been said about the asymmetry between how people on the left and right are critical of news sources, the point here is clearer, but more surprising (and also less controversial).
One big, measurable difference between the news consumption habits of the left and the right is that left-wingers get a significant portion of their news from (almost exclusively left-wing) late-night talk shows, while right-wing viewers don't. . Some of these shows are funny. Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart can really make you laugh. But when it comes to political influence, it's a bad idea to get your political news from late-night talk shows.
To see this, we need to turn to research on the “persistent influence effect” – the psychological phenomenon where information that we know to be false still remains in our heads and influences our thinking and action.
Here is one of the most famous experiments on continuous influence, conducted in Colin Seifert's lab at the University of Michigan in 1994. The experimental setup is as follows: first, the experimenter tells you a story. You have no idea what you are going to do with this story. Here's an example: a story about a warehouse fire with a lot of details - where the warehouse was, who worked there. At one point the experimenter tells you that there were cans of oil paint and gas cylinders stored on the premises. But he immediately backtracks and tells you that this is actually not true. He says that there were no cans of paint or gas cylinders at all, so they couldn't have started the fire.
After being bombarded with all this information, you are asked to complete a series of tasks for 10 minutes that are unrelated to the story. You then have to answer a series of questions about the warehouse fire. The revelation is that when asked why the fire spread so quickly, people say things like, “Oil/diesel fires are hard to put out.” Although the information about the oil paint cans was false, the vast majority of participants answered about the paint cans and gas cylinders.
The participants knew full well that this information had been withdrawn, but they used it in their thinking anyway. False information is not simply canceled by the clear statement that it is false. It remains intact and continues to influence the reasoning process.
Experiments on the effect of lingering influence, like that of the warehouse fire, show that once you learn something, it's very hard to unlearn it, even if part of your mind knows it's false—it exerts a lingering influence. . In the experiment, the false information is corrected in seconds, but it still wreaks havoc on our thinking. But most of the false information we receive throughout our lives is not corrected in a few seconds. So it is even less likely that we can unlearn them all.
This brings us back to the news. As the effect of persistent influence shows, everything you see has an effect on your mind, even if you know for a fact that what you see is fake. And, as these experiments show, once you have a certain belief, it is very difficult to lose it. So if you show left-wing viewers a right-wing politician saying all kinds of stupid things and they make fun of them, it doesn't have the effect of making the viewer believe that this politician is saying stupid things. No. It can have the effect of making the viewer more exposed to the ideas presented (nonsensical or not) by the right-wing politician. And, as the continuing influence effect shows, being exposed to any idea, even if it's ridiculous, even if we know it to be false, will continue to influence our reasoning processes in the future.
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