OBSERVATIONSHow Disinformation
Hacks Your Brain
The digital age has heightened our vulnerability
to falsehood, but recognizing such weaknesses
can help guard against themT
hree years ago Edgar Welch sent a text
message to a friend announcing he was
“Raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing
[sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many.” Two
days later, he drove 350 miles to a Washington,
D.C., pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong and en-
tered with a .38 revolver and an AR-15 semiauto-
matic rifle. He fired shots inside in an attempt to
investigate what he believed was a child sex ring
with ties to top Democratic Party leaders and sent
restaurant patrons and staff fleeing in fear. The
sex ring was fake news. The consequences, how-
ever, were real. Welch left the premises under ar-
rest and later pled guilty to local and federal weap-
ons charges.
At the time of Welch’s disinformation-driven
rampage, “post-truth” had just recently entered the
public imagination. A few weeks before Welch’s
arrest, Oxford Dictionaries declared it the word ofthe year. Many people still struggled to understand
how a polite, soft-spoken person like Welch could
be led so far from reality. But as the disinformation
age has continued to develop over the past three
years, science has not stood still. It has given us
a more detailed picture than ever of the ways that
disinformation hacks our truth judgments.If the picture is detailed, it is also disconcerting.
It suggests that you and I are probably not so
different from Welch as we might like to think.
Take for example, what happens when we are
subjected to repeated false claims. In a recent
study, a research team led by Jonas De keers-
maecker found that even those of us who are in-Brett Beasley is associate director of the
Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership
and a term assistant teaching professor of management
and organization at the Mendoza College of Business
at the University of Notre Dame.GETTY IMAGESOPINION