54 International The EconomistNovember 2nd 2019
2 represent the policies and outlook they
themselves espouse. Because Mr Trump
has abandoned so many traditional Repub-
lican policies, such as support for free trade
and suspicion of Russia, the researchers
concluded that it is personal: those who
still call themselves Republicans support
Mr Trump because of who he is, not what
he stands for. And if personal loyalty
trumps ideology, then voters may back a
politician even if he does not tell the truth.
Indeed, Mr Trump’s supporters may
even relish his deceits. If you believe that
all politicians are liars, those outraged by
Mr Trump’s falsehoods are hypocrites. The
ire of his opponents and members of the
press, such as Mr Kessler, at his lies is taken
chiefly as evidence of his cocking a snook
at the swampy establishment.
But even in daily life, without the par-
ticular pressures of politics, people find it
hard to spot liars. Tim Levine of the Univer-
sity of Alabama, Birmingham, has spent
decades running tests that allow partici-
pants (apparently unobserved) to cheat. He
then asks them on camera if they have
played fair. He asks others to look at the re-
cordings and decide who is being forth-
right about cheating and who is covering it
up. In 300 such tests people got it wrong
about half of the time, no better than a ran-
dom coin toss. Few people can detect a liar.
Even those whose job is to conduct inter-
views to dig out hidden truths, such as po-
lice officers or intelligence agents, are no
better than ordinary folk.
Evolution may explain credulity. In a
forthcoming book, “Duped”, Mr Levine ar-
gues that evolutionary pressures have
adapted people to assume that others are
telling the truth. Most communication by
most people is truthful most of the time, so
a presumption of honesty is usually justi-
fied and is necessary to keep communica-
tion efficient. If you checked everything
you were told from first principles, it
would become impossible to talk. Humans
are hard-wired to assume that what they
hear is true—and therefore, says Mr Levine,
“hard-wired to be duped”.
So strong is that instinct that people
suspend their critical faculties when given
orders by a superior. The point was made
by one of the most famous experiments in
psychology, the “obedience to authority”
test conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961.
Subjects were (falsely) told that they were
taking part in a test that required them to
administer electric shocks to another par-
ticipant (who was an actor). As the test pro-
ceeded, they were willing to give shocks so
large that the impact would have been fatal
had they been real. The normal interpreta-
tion is that people are willing to behave un-
conscionably if they can tell themselves
they were merely “following orders”. But
Mr Levine raises another possibility: they
may well have had doubts that the experi-ment was real, but not sufficient to over-
ride what he calls the “truth default”.
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.
In politics, however, these explanations
cannot be the whole story. At the heart of
the lying-politician paradox is an uncom-
fortable fact: voters appear to support liars
more than they believe them. Mr Trump’s
approval rating is 11 points higher than the
share of people who trust him to tell the
truth. A third of British voters view Mr
Johnson favourably but only a fifth think
he is honest. Voters believe in their leaders
even if they do not believe them. Why?
The answer starts with the primacy of
intuitive decision-making. 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 emo-
tions. 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.
The most important consequence of the
domination of intuition is the pervasive-
ness of confirmation bias—the tendency to
seek out and interpret information that
confirms what you already think. It is a fea-
ture of reasoning, not a bug. There are few
better illustrations than Americans’ news-gathering habits. To oversimplify, Demo-
crats read the New York Times; Republicans
watch Fox News. A Pew poll in 2018 found
that 82% of Democrats thought the media
perform a useful “watchdog” role of keep-
ing politicians from doing things they
shouldn’t. Only 38% of Republicans
agreed. By contrast, five years earlier, when
Barack Obama was president, the figures
were 67% and 69% respectively.
A new version of confirmation bias is
“identity-protective cognition”, argues
Dan Kahan of Yale Law School. This says
that people process information in a way
that protects their self-image and the im-
age they think others have of them. For ex-
ample, those who live surrounded by cli-
mate-change sceptics may avoid saying
anything that suggests humankind is alter-
ing the climate, simply to avoid becoming
an outcast. A climate sceptic encircled by
members of Extinction Rebellion might do
the same thing in reverse. As people be-
come more partisan, more issues are being
taken as markers of the kind of person you
are: in Britain, the country’s membership
of the European Union; in America, guns,
trade, even American football. All give rise
to the acceptance of bias.Deceit of power
Thomas Gilovich of Cornell shows how
fake news, cognition bias and assuming
that people are telling the truth interact to
make it easier to believe lies. If you want to
believe a thing, he argues (that is, a lie that
supports your preconceived ideas), you ask
yourself: “Can I believe it?” A single study
or comment online is usually enough to
give you permission to hold this belief,
even if it is bogus. But if you do not want to
believe something (because it contradicts
your settled opinions) you are more likely
to ask: “Must I believe it?” Then, one appar-
ently reputable statement on the other side
will satisfy you. That may be why so many
climate sceptics manage to cling to their
beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evi-
dence to the contrary. Activists point out
that 99% of scientists believe the Earth is
warming up because of human actions. But
people who doubt the reality of climate
change listen to the other 1%.
You might expect (or hope) that
thoughtful people would be more amena-
ble to the force of fact-based evidence than
most. Alas, no. According to David Perkins
of Harvard University, the brighter people
are, the more deftly they can conjure up
post-hoc justifications for arguments that
back their own side. Brainboxes are as like-
ly as anyone else to ignore facts which sup-
port their foes. John Maynard Keynes, a
(famously intelligent) British economist,
is said to have asked someone: “When the
facts change, I change my mind. What do
you do, sir?” If they were honest, most
would reply: “I stick to my guns.” 7