C4| Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Detecting
Fake News
Takes Time
FROM TOP: TBWA\CHIAT\DAY; DONALD UHRBROCK/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; EVERETT COLLECTIONMIND & MATTER
ALISON GOPNIK
TOMASZ WALENTA
A FEW WEEKS AGO,
I took part in a free-
wheeling annual gath-
ering of social scien-
tists from the academic
and tech worlds. The psychologists
and political scientists, data analysts
and sociologists at Social Science
Foo Camp, held in Menlo Park, Calif.,
were preoccupied with one problem
in particular: With an election loom-
ing, what can we do about the
spread of misinformation and fake
news, especially on social media?
Fact-checking all the billions of
stories on social media is obviously
impractical. It may not be effective
either. Earlier studies have shown an
“illusory truth” effect: Repeating a
story, even if you say that it’s false,
may actually make people more
likely to remember it as true. Maybe,
in our highly polarized world, they
can’t even tell the difference; all that
matters is whether the story sup-
ports your politics.
But new research contradicts this
pessimistic picture. David Rand of
MIT and Gordon Pennycook of the
University of Regina have suggested
that “cognitive laziness” may be a
bigger problem than bias. It’s not
that people can’t tell or don’t care
whether a story is true; it’s just that
they don’t put in the effort to find
out.
A new study in the Journal of Ex-
perimental Psychology by Profs.
Rand and Pennycook, with Bence
Bago of the University of Toulouse,
shows that if you give people time to
think, they do better at judging
whether news stories on social me-
dia are true or false.
The researchers showed more
than 1,000 people examples of true
and false headlines that had actually
appeared online—real fake news, as
it were. Some headlines were slanted
toward Republicans, like “Obama
was going to Castro’s funeral until
Trump told him this,” while others
were slanted toward Democrats, like“Gorsuch started ‘fascism forever’
club at elite prep school.”
The researchers asked partici-
pants to judge whether the headlines
were accurate. One group was al-
lowedtotakeasmuchtimeasthey
wanted to make a judgment, while
another group had to decide in seven
seconds, while they were also trying
to remember a pattern of dots
shown on the screen. Then they had
a chance to think it over and try
again. The participants also filled
out a questionnaire about their polit-
ical views.
As you might expect, people were
somewhat more likely to believe fake
news that fit their ideological lean-
ings. But regardless of their politics,
people were more likely to spot the
difference between real and fake
news when they had time to think
than when they had to decide
quickly.
Of course, when we browse Twit-
ter or Facebook, we are more likely
to be rushed and distracted than pa-
tiently reflective. Lots of items are
pouring quickly through our feeds,
and nobody is asking us to pause
and think about whether those items
are accurate.
But it would be relatively easy for
the platforms to slow us down a lit-
tle and make us more thoughtful.
For example, you could simply ask
people to rate how accurate a story
is before they share it. In prelimi-
nary, still unpublished work, Profs.
Rand and Pennycook found that ask-
ing people to judge the accuracy of
one story on Twitter made them less
likely to share others that were inac-
curate.
Cognitive science tells us that
people are stupider than we think in
some ways and smarter in others.
The challenge is to design media
that support our cognitive strengths
instead of exploiting our weaknesses.REVIEW
Harper Lee, author of
‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
(left), and Richard
Wright, author of
‘Native Son’ (below).E
arlier this month,
Barnes & Noble be-
came the latest insti-
tution to regret wad-
ing into the war over
literature and identity politics.
For Black History Month, the
company planned to publish clas-
sic works of literature in “Diverse
Editions,” with new covers fea-
turing nonwhite figures. One ver-
sion of “Romeo and Juliet,” for
instance, would be illustrated by
a black couple kissing, even
though Shakespeare’s characters
are Italian. Within days, however,
the company withdrew the plan
in the face of online rancor over
what one critic called “literary
blackface.” While the covers were
intended to make canonical
works more appealing to non-
white readers, some readers saw
them as an attempt to cover up
the fact that most of those works
were written by white authors.
Controversies like this are be-
coming a regular occurrence in
American literature. In January,
the novel “American Dirt,” about
a Mexican mother and son who
come to the U.S. in flight from vi-
olent drug gangs, had its turn in
the spotlight. Critics complained
that its white author, Jeanine
Cummins, was unqualified to
write about the subject. In this
case, the term “brownface” was
used to attack the book, even
though Ms. Cummins explained
that she has a Puerto Rican
grandmother. An author who had
been endorsed by Oprah and Ste-
phen King suddenly found herself
on the defensive, as her publisher
canceled her national book tour,
ostensibly out of concern for her
safety.
It wouldn’t be sur-
prising if literary fic-
tion begins to head
down the same path as
young adult fiction,
which several years ago
embraced the institu-
tion of “sensitivity
readers”—prepublica-
tion censors who are
hired primarily to head
off objections about a
book’s handling of eth-
nicity and sexuality. In
the YA field, it’s in-
creasingly common for
books to be canceled
even in advance of pub-
lication on the grounds
of cultural appropria-
tion or insensitivity.
Clearly, American lit-
erature is engaged in
the same difficult de-
bates over authority
and identity that are
convulsing American
politics. The American
literary canon, like
most other national institutions,
was dominated by white Protes-
tant men for 200 years. As that
definition of Americanness
changes, many are beginning to
wonder if the old stories are still
meaningful to people whose an-
cestors had no hand in shaping
them. Some of the most impor-
tant and controversial narratives
of our time address this very
question: Who has the right to
tell our stories?
An obvious danger in this de-
bate is that it threatens to deny
the basic truth that makes litera-
ture possible: that we are capableBYADAMKIRSCHof understanding lives and worlds
very different from our own. If the
old saying “write what you know”
is taken too literally, the writer
can only tell stories about people
who share his or her exact biogra-
phy. But Henry James wasn’t an 8-
year-old girl when he wrote
“What Maisie Knew,” any more
than Ursula Le Guin was a wizard
when she wrote “A Wizard of
Earthsea.” The current tendency
to reduce writers to demographic
categories is a new version of the
old moralizing impulse that seeks
to constrain artists’ imaginations
in ways that the moralists think
are good for society.
But while freedom of imagina-
tion needs to be defended, calls to
“decolonize your bookshelf”—that
is, to make room in our reading
diet for writers excluded from tra-
ditional literary canons—can’t
simply be dismissed as politicalcorrectness. Critics of Barnes and
Noble’s Diverse Editions were re-
acting to the fact that while non-
white readers are regularly ex-
pected to grant the universality of
work by white writers, the reverse
happens much more seldom.
Writers of color, in particular,
are understandably frustrated
that American readers prefer to
read about the experiences of
nonwhite characters when they
are being told by white writers.
The 2009 novel “The Help,” about
African-American maids in 1960s
Mississippi, sold more than seven
million copies and was turned
into an Oscar-winning movie; its
author, Kathryn Stockett, is
white. Compare that with the
2019 novel “The Nickel Boys,” by
the African-American novelist
Colson Whitehead. The book,
which recounts the ordeals of
black teenagers at a Florida re-
form school, is based
on true events at the
Dozier School for Boys,
which was shut down in
2011 after revelations
that students there had
been tortured and mur-
dered by staff. Mr.
Whitehead’s book was
critically acclaimed and
even made some best-
seller lists, but it’s hard
to imagine it being em-
braced by millions of
American readers, or
coming soon to a multi-
plex near you.The controversy over ‘American Dirt’ shows
why it wouldn’t be a bad idea for readers to
‘decolonize’ their bookshelves.Whose
Stories
Should We
Read?
This is an old tradition in
American fiction. The enduring
popularity of “To Kill a Mocking-
bird,” the first (and often only)
novel about racism that many
Americans read, stems from the
way it makes white characters the
protagonists and turns black char-
acters into facilitators of their
moral education. If Richard
Wright’s classic 1940 novel “Na-
tive Son”—which examines the
psychological and social factors
that lead its black protagonist,
Bigger Thomas, to commit a mur-
der—were taught in as many
classrooms as Harper Lee’s book,
young readers would have their
minds challenged in salutary ways.
For a writer’s imagination is
connected to his or her knowl-
edge of the world, and there’s no
denying that different writers
have different kinds of knowl-
edge. Edith Wharton, a wealthy
socialite, did not know New York
in the same way as Henry Roth, a
poor Yiddish-speaking immigrant,
or Ralph Ellison, a Harlem intel-
lectual. All of these writers imag-
ined characters very unlike them-
selves, but none of them could
have written the books the others
wrote. An American literature
that accepted only one of them
and ignored the others would be
impoverished and falsified.
The rancor of the current de-
bate over literary representation
comes from the belief that litera-
ture operates this way—that hon-oring or paying attention to one
writer means ignoring and disre-
specting another. But economists
know that growth is crucial for
democracy, because a static or
shrinking economy means that
competition becomes a zero-sum
game, pitting people against one
another. The same is true of liter-
ature. When we argue about who
has the right to tell America’s
stories, we are in danger of as-
suming that there’s a fixed num-
ber of such stories, so that if Ms.
Cummins tells the story of a Mex-
ican immigrant mother, that
means a writer of Mexican
descent has lost the
chance to tell it.
The best antidote to
such zero-sum thinking is
to grow the pie—that is,
to cultivate more and bet-
ter readers. And an impor-
tant part of that cultiva-
tion involves being open
to stories that challenge
our expectations. Litera-
ture thrives when readers
have the confidence to en-
counter genuine differ-
ence, to hear all kinds of
stories so long as they are
well told. In this sense, a
healthy literature and a
healthy democracy may be
more deeply connected
than we usually think.Proposed covers for Barnes
& Noble’s ‘Diverse Editions.’There’s no
denying that
different
writers have
different
kinds of
knowledge.