Thank you very much. Hello. It's very kind of you. I don't know if any of you have ever been to New York, but just on the corner of Central Park and Fifth Avenue, there is an iconic building, the Plaza Hotel. It's beautiful as the The Oak Room bar used to be, that unaccompanied ladies were not allowed in the Okun bar. I think they changed that slightly more recently than one might expect. How about many great meetings have been had there?
Lady Gaga has played there. A bunch of finance ministers signed a currency manipulation agreement there in the 1980s. It's still all kinds of really the whole gamut. But the meeting that I want to discuss today took place in 1953, ten days before Christmas. And it was a meeting between the presidents of four of the largest tobacco companies in the United States. And they were meeting with John Hill, who is a PR guru. He was the head of Hill and Knowlton public relations firm.
And it was a crisis meeting. The reason for the crisis was. Turns out cigarettes give you cancer. So German scientists had demonstrated this fairly clearly in the 1930s, but nobody really wanted to talk too much about what German scientists been doing in the 1930s. Then Richard Dole and Austin Bradford Hill in the UK demonstrated a pretty clear link that basically almost everyone with lung cancer was was a smoker.
Then in the United States, Ernest Window and Evarts Graham demonstrated that you could induce cancer, a randomised controlled trial if you painted condensed tobacco smoke, the tar that comes from condensed tobacco smoke on the backs of mice. You could produce skin cancer on the backs of mice. So for some reason, that seemed to be a more powerful, powerful finding than than what Donald and Bradford Hill found.
But really none of that was the problem. The problem was the Reader's Digest, which is the most popular widely read magazine on the planet, had published an article with the title Cancer by the Carton. So you have a problem because your your only product is not only obviously addictive, but also now incredibly dangerous and all of the modern discussions about healthy eating and causes of cancer. Well, what does burnt toast cause cancer? Maybe bacon causes cancer.
Maybe clingfilm causes cancer. I mean, some of these connections are real and some of them are nonsense. But what's obviously true is none of them none of them are remotely close to being as significant as the link between cigarettes and cancer and all kinds of other illnesses. This is an absolutely fatal product. So it's awkward. It's awkward. And I lost two cooks, great observer of America. In 1954, he harks back to Sir Walter Raleigh, bringing the tobacco to Europe.
And in 1954, Alistair Cooke wrote that really the publication of the next serious scientific study into the link between cancer and cigarettes, the next the next study that was published that might well and what Sir Walter Raleigh began. But John Hill, the PR guru, had a plan. And the plan, it turns out.
Worked incredibly well. Because for decades the tobacco companies were able to fend off regulation and litigation and even the perception among their customers that the cigarette I mean, yeah, maybe that maybe maybe they might be slightly back give you a cough anyway. Just they, they managed to hold back all of these things for a tremendously long time. And this was despite. Absolutely no unarguable scientific evidence, unimpeachable facts, incredibly credible scientists.
And yet the credible scientists weren't believed. The indisputable facts ended up being disputed. And the doubts just rolled on and on for years and then for decades. And there are lots of different arms to John Hill strategy, lots of different ways in which it worked. But we we now know quite a lot about it. And one of the reasons we know a lot about it is after in 1998, a huge 1998 settlement in the United States.
A lot of the internal documents produced by the tobacco companies and by their public relations firms have become public. Publicly available and publicly searchable. And they've been exhaustively examined by academics and journalists. And there's one that was written in 1969, a particular memo that I think has become iconic, just discussing how is it that we are going to fend off these claims that cigarettes are incredibly bad for you? And there's this line in this memo, and the line is.
Doubt is our product. And we're not just going to make cigarettes. We also need to manufacture doubt. And for all these years, the expert evidence, the statistics, the facts. They couldn't quite break through against this wall of doubt. I'm a fan of fans. Of course I'm a fan of facts. But I couldn't help noticing the irony that Facebook chose to celebrate the 63rd anniversary of the meeting at the Plaza Hotel with a press release.
I don't think it was deliberate, but the press release was all about how Facebook was going to combat fake news. So all these lies that people tell on Facebook. Facebook was going to fix that. And the way they were going to fix it was if people thought that something wasn't true, they'd be able to flag up this fake news story and say, I think this is not true. Then, I mean, none of this is quite transparent, but it would then pass the fact checkers.
And of course, you know, I love fact checkers. Some of my best friends are fact checkers. You know, I myself I have dabbled myself, in fact, checking. Okay. So we'll go to the fact checkers. And the fact checkers would check their facts and they would say, well, this turns out not to be true. And then it would go back to Facebook. Then Facebook would put a flag on the story saying, oh, this story is disputed by independent fact checkers.
You may want to go and check the independent fact checkers, independent facts. And it might even it might even although the details of this were not discussed, it might even be downgraded in the algorithm. And this means that you would just be less likely to see it. And if Facebook is showing you things you might want to see and so maybe you might not want to see things that are manifestly untrue. We might we might downgraded in the algorithm, of course.
Why were they doing this when they were doing this? Because Donald Trump got elected. Basically, they were doing this because it was it was in the air. And suddenly we had noticed that a man who was perfectly happy to just say something that wasn't true was demonstrably untrue. And then he'd be corrected and said, you know, Mr. Trump, when you said you never said that China invented global warming, here's your tweet saying that China invented global warming. They just had never said that.
I never said that. You know, you know, you spread all those rumours about Barack Obama not being born in the United States. I was Hillary Clinton. She's put those rumours just and just. Seemed impossible to get through this wall of willingness to just say things that weren't true. I didn't put that slide up there. But, you know, let's don't mention the bus. It just seems like politicians have always been willing to say things that aren't true.
But it seemed that a line had been crossed. When you say something that is demonstrably untrue, clearly untrue.
And authoritative figures. For example, in the case of the bus, Sir Andrew Dilnot, the former presenter of more or less the head of Nuffield College and the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority says, you know what, that number on the bus that's misleading and it's not is completely true that this willingness to just plough on is perhaps one of the reasons why our friends over at the Oxford Dictionaries named Post-Truth their word of the year.
So this sense that somehow the truth no longer had this perch is the truth no longer seem to matter to people. This is what Facebook were responding to. And the idea and more traditional journalists have responded in a in a related way. We need to we need to check more facts. We need to use more fact checking. We need to rebut untrue claims. It's basically is the same thing as Facebook is doing, except without the algorithms.
And the idea is, well, that will then lead to a more informed electorate and more reasoned political discourse and better decisions and more respect for the truth. That's the idea. I'm not sure that that is actually going to happen. I'm not sure, or at least I'm not sure that that is remotely enough. Now remember that memo? Doubt is our product. It's not enough to just have fact checkers rebutting untrue claims as long as there is still doubt out there.
The controversy continues and some people thrive off the controversy. We have to remember that the tobacco companies were able to muddy the waters partly by hacking the norms of science and the norms of journalism. They had this judo move that would turn both journalistic norms and scientific norms around to become self-defeating. So you've just called for more research. We need more research.
Who who doesn't want more research? All I'm ever told by science, whenever I tune in and listen to Ted Robbins and Brian Cox on Infinite Monkey Cage, they're always telling me, well, all scientific truth is provisional. You know, it's always subject to to disprove. So the tobacco companies just take that idea and run with it. Well, some people say they cause cancer, but we need more research. And the journalistic norm is of objectivity and balance.
So if a tobacco company produces something that seems objective and of course they have a view on whether cigarettes cause cancer and balance demands that you report the tobacco companies view on whether cigarettes cause cancer. And so the controversy continues. Now, in the 1950s, the 1960s, we weren't smart to this. It was a tremendously sophisticated campaign. And I understand why a lot of people were caught out by it.
A lot of my people of journalists were caught out by this. But it's 2017 now. And I still see some of the same moves being used and I still see them having the same effect. And I think that some of the techniques that we're using that the rebuttal, the insistence on, well, let's just start with the facts. I love facts. But I'm not sure it's working. I mean, take take the fake news issue. So let me give you a piece of news. Pope Francis Shocks World Endorses Donald Trump for President.
It's the most successful story on Facebook in America in the three months before the election. By most successful, I mean it had the most engagements, the most the most likes, dislikes, shares, comments. People were interacting with this story. And of course, that, of course, is part of the problem. In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg described Facebook. He keeps saying it's not a media company, but he also described Facebook as the most perfect newspaper.
He said, our goal is to build the perfect personalised newspaper for every person in the world. He said, We going to show you the stuff that's going to be most interesting to you. But of course, if you are really interested in the story. That Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump for president. Now that that's the perfect something, but I'm not sure it's the perfect newspaper because spoiler alert, Pope Francis did not endorse Donald Trump.
Okay. Didn't happen. So, of course, we you know, we get very, very excited about fake news. I was at a meeting of the Royal Statistical Society last night, and there was a lot of talk about fake news. But I think that's partly journalists like me. Really feeling insulted that this sort of stuff looks like news and gets traded around Facebook. And by the way, a lot of it is not coming out of the Kremlin or indeed out of hyperpartisan right wing blogs.
A lot of it is just being manufactured by teenagers. From California to Macedonia, because people click on it. And if you click on it, you can sell adverts. So this is the ultimate insult, because I can assure you newspapers are not making a lot of money. So it turns out that fake news is more profitable than actual news. And it seems it's more politically successful as well. So, of course, we're insulted and we want something to be done about it.
And I think something should be done about it. And I suspect that Facebook's tweaks to the algorithms probably will be effective. But what I also think is that the focus on fake news is a distraction. This is not the main issue that we can quantify this. Ironically, the Royal Statistical Society panel discussion last night did not try to quantify fake news. But we economists, we're the proper nerds. Forget the statisticians of the says proper nerds try and quantify these things.
So a couple of economists, Hunter Alcott and Matthew Gentzkow. Matthew Gentzkow, by the way, is one of the most respected economists in the United States, won the Bates Clark Medal, which has also been won by Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate Gary Beck and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman by Steve Freakonomics Levitt. I mean it's it's serious what in the continental and he studies media media markets polarisation and media bias.
So Hunter Walcott and Matthew Chance because all this fake news going around they said we need to quantify this and we need to get a research paper out quickly. So various Trump trolls through Facebook's data and checking with independent fact checking sites, and they think they quantified the amount of fake news on Facebook. And it turns out that if you just look at the top most shared stories, fake news looks like it's doing extremely well.
And of course, part of the reason is there is actually only one story that says that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump, whereas any true story, there are hundreds of different. If you go to Google News and Google any true story, there are hundreds of versions of it. So any particular one version of that story may not be very widely shared. So it turns out that the total volume of fake news is not that big.
It's not that small, but it's not that big either. So there were 38 million shares of fake stories in the 90 days before the election. 38 million sounds like quite a lot. 30 million were pro-Trump, 8 million pro-Clinton. Apparently, they tried getting fake news stories going around. Bernie Clinton. Penny, Bernie. Bernie Clifton. Yeah, no, not Bernie. Because of Bernie Sanders, they tried to get Bernie Sanders fake news stories going,
but it turns out Bernie supporters weren't interested in clicking on it. So there's no money in trolling Bernie Sanders. So. So there was 38 million fake news stories. Sounds like a lot. Well, that's 420,000 shares a day. I can out a paper copy of the New York Times contains multiple true stories on every page and a lot of pages. And there are more than 420,000 paper copies of the New York Times sold every day. So far, 20,000 fake news stories. It's not nothing, but it's not that much.
And Hunt and Gentzkow tried to quantify, could it have swung? The election was quite a close election. Could it have swung the election? Maybe. If. If one fake news story had the same impact as 36 TV campaigns, which is possible, but I think stretches the boundaries of credibility. So Gentzkow estimates that the typical voter there are 130 million voters. The typical voter could remember seeing exactly one fake news story, approximately one fake news story.
I think it was 0.98 fake news stories in the in the 90 days. So a lot of people didn't couldn't remember ever seeing any fake news stories. And, of course, a lot of people who did see fake news stories didn't believe them. So it's unlikely that fake news is really the issue. I think that the problem lies somewhere else. And. Remember the tobacco strategy. There's a handwritten note in one of the tobacco memos from the 1970s, and it says the key point.
Keep the controversy alive. As long as we're arguing about fake news, we're not arguing about the issues that really matter. Now I want to say, I think. Fact checking. Both in terms of the narrow specialist websites like full fact dot org is wonderful and independent think tanks like the Institute for Fiscal Studies and fact checking by mainstream journalists. The BBC. The Financial Times. The Guardian. The Times.
Just establishing what is true and what isn't and how we know and what the sources are. It's incredibly important. It's its foundation. If we don't have the statistics to understand how the country works, what the budget of the national health services, what the deficit is, what the unemployment rate is, what GDP growth is, what the inflation rate is.
If we don't have those sorts of statistics and we don't do our very best because no statistics are perfect, but we do our very best to collect the most rigorous and robust statistics. And if we don't have agreement on what those things are, then we're really in trouble. We've got we've got we've got nothing really except feelings about politics. So facts are incredibly important. But I think it's it's it feels comfortable for people like me.
And I suspect for many of the people here, it feels comfortable to think that just just explain the facts. Just give people the facts. Show them the facts. Show them what's true. Feels that that should be enough. And it's not enough. That's never enough. And I have some facts to prove that the facts are never enough. So one issue well documented in psychology is a. I mean, there were three different issues, but they all have the same name, which is confusing. Blame the psychologist.
Don't blame me. They go by the collective name of the backfire effect. The backfire effect is I give you facts and you get stupider. Okay. So how does this work? Well, number one, the backfire effect sometimes operates on memory. So the the most ridiculous example of this is when in a sometimes see these in court dramas, somebody says something outrageous in court and then the judge says the jury will disregard what was just said.
And of course, no one no one can ever disregard what was just said. You can't just make yourself we don't we don't computers. You can't place plus delete and wipe that memory back. Of course, you remember what was said, and it turns out it's surprisingly difficult to forget untrue information. So one classic study of this gave people an account of a fire. There's been this fire, and you need to read this account of this fire and various pieces of information come to come about.
And it turns out there was some there were some paints in this warehouse where there was this fire. And that may have been something to do with why there was so much smoke and so on. It did it anyway. And it turns out that later investigation reveals that actually that thing about the paint is not true. There weren't any discarded paints in the warehouse, no paints at all. Maybe even further discussion of the fire.
And then you start to ask people, well, you know, why was there so much smoke? And they would say, well, because of the paints it had. But you. We're the patents that honour the. No, the patents one that I remember the patent for that. But people's, people's interpretation of what they'd seen was coloured by the fact that they'd been given false information. The false information had been withdrawn, but it never really completely gets withdrawn. Now, the irony is, the more often I rebut a myth.
The more often you hear it and the more often you hear it, the more often you remember it. And it's kind of difficult to remember that it's untrue. And when I spoke to Angelina Coe, who was one of the leading economists on the leave campaign, who I believe is a very truthful man, I was asking him about this claim on the bus, 250 million a week. It's not true, but it's completely untrue, provably untrue. And I told him about it and he said, Yeah, I know. It's kind of it's not really true, is it?
I mean, he was like, well, you know, but if you know, it's not true. And he said, I wish they hadn't. If they didn't ask me, I wish they hadn't gone with that number, you know, because they could have said, I forget 225 million, maybe. I think you can really justify 225 million. It's hard really hard to say that that's untrue. And to be honest, who cares? But who cares whether it's 350 million or 225 million?
But, I mean, the basic message was we send money to the EU, we could spend it on the NHS. The basic message would be the same. Just one would be false and one would be factually correct. And we can argue about the economics of it all. But the thing is, I think from a political point of view, Wilko he was this was an honourable remark, but politically he was completely wrong because if they had put 225 million on the bus, nobody would ever have talked about it ever again.
And that would just have faded away. But all the Remain campaign did, aided by me and aided by my fact checking friends, is just bang on about the 350 million and how it wasn't true. And of course, a lot of people a lot of what people were hearing was 350 million. Yeah, I remember. But familiarity is tremendously powerful. And of course, familiarity is often a very powerful way of making decisions.
So the psychologist Good Giga Enza, has assembled stock market portfolios by stopping people on street corners and showing them a list of companies and saying, Do you recognise any of the companies on this list? And he assembles his portfolio of stocks that people have never heard of and stocks that people have heard of. And it turns out that robustly the portfolio of stocks that people have heard of does better in the next year.
So he did that in the middle of the dotcom boom and outperformed all of the professional stock pickers. Now, people said, well, that was the dotcom boom. So he said, okay, well, we'll do it again. Then he did it. In the past, still worked. The companies that people had heard of did better. So, you know, familiarity, just having heard acclaim. You know, there's a number evolutionary reasons, I think, why we cling onto them.
But if you want to rebut something just constantly going on about the thing that isn't true doesn't seem to help. That's one aspect of the backfire effect. Second aspect of the backfire effect is simply a really simple message sticks. And fact checking is often complicated. If you go to reality check on the BBC or to full fact, these are great sites. I'm not criticising these sites. You go down and you just got the footnotes and explainers and it all.
It all depends what you mean. And well, you know, but if you measure from 1978, then it is true. But, but this claim was from 1984 and that's not really true. And then and and I know exactly why they do this. They have to do this because they have to be absolutely meticulous, because they're interested in the facts and not only interested in the facts, in documenting their reasoning, exactly how did they come to reach this conclusion?
And you can follow the hyperlinks and you can look up the sources and you can go to the Office for National Statistics. Of course, it's vital that you do it that way. If you are in the fact checking business, there is no other way to do it. But it's not persuasive. It's not supposed to be persuasive. That's not the design of the website. But that's why when Facebook flag up, this may not be true.
Go and look at a fact checking website. I'm not sure that's going to work because people remember the simple truth over the complicated one. And this has been documented in incredibly complicated research papers that I'm going to describe to you, because I hope that you're going to absorb the simple truth of what I just said. Now, the third issue, the third source of the backfire effects. I need to take a step back. It's all about something we call motivated reasoning.
Now the motivated reasoning. You know, I'm an economist. We don't we don't do this psychology stuff. So all I wanted to do to understand motivated reasoning was to go to this classic psychological study. And it was a study of a football game or an American football game or, as they called it in America, a football game. And 1951 was a football game, college football game between Princeton and Dartmouth. And it's not a very nice game. A lot of fouls.
It's pretty ill tempered. Both quarterbacks have to leave the field with injuries. One of them has to be stretchered off because he's got a broken leg. It's not it's not a nice game. So a short time after the game, I think it was a week, two psychologists, Albert Haseloff and Hadley Cantrell, has taught at Dartmouth and controls at Princeton, and they were aware of this game. They give the same survey to their students.
So the Princeton students, the dark students, and they ask them about this game, you know, the students who saw the game, you know, was it was it bad tempered? Was it was it tough but fair or was it just, you know, tough and unfair? And if you thought there were problems, who started the problems? Was it Dartmouth or was it Princeton and all these sorts of questions?
And what they found, I think, unsurprisingly, is basically the Dartmouth students thought that Dartmouth was pretty blameless and Princeton were a bunch of animals. And the Princeton students thought to say, rather, Dartmouth student. So I don't think that's incredibly surprising. But then a couple of years later, the researchers. Did a much more interesting study. They got video of the game. And they showed it to the students and they said, what I want you to do is count.
Maybe not quite objective truths, but never objective facts about the game. So how many infringements did you see who committed the infringement? Was it a serious infringement or a trivial infringement? Of course there is. There's room for opinion in these judgements, but fundamentally not asking you who behaved better. I'm asking you to count fouls and and who committed them. And the title of the study is They Saw a Game.
And the idea behind that title is, well, it would be nice to say they saw the game, but it seemed that everybody was seeing their own version of the game. They were watching the same videotape, but they weren't seeing the same events. They were filtering them because of their own partisan bias. Of course, that's football. And, you know, you've met football fans. You know, maybe it's just about that kind of tribalism. Well, it turns out not.
It turns out we see the same thing in politics. There's a fascinating study by Dan Kahan at Yale of the same sort of thing, only in political protest. So he has video of protesters outside the building, you know, placards and yelling away and that they're doing what protesters do. So there are forums, experiments, a randomised controlled trial. In one arm he shows the footage to Liberal students, lefty students.
And he says these are pro-choice, anti-abortion activists and they are protesting outside an abortion clinic. The second group. Still liberal lefty students. He says these are lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans activists, and they are protesting outside an army recruitment centre against the then policy of don't ask, don't tell. Where if you were if you were queer and you went into the military, you had to keep quiet about it. And they promise not to ask any questions.
They were protesting outside the Army recruitment centre, the third box in this randomised controlled trial. They showed the video to conservative right wing students and they said it's the pro-choice, anti-abortion protect protesters outside the abortion clinic. And the fourth, of course, they showed them all the same video. They showed it to the conservative, the right wing students. And they said, these are LGBT activists protesting Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
And then they said. What do you think of this protest? But they didn't just sort of say, well, you know, how does it make you feel? And, you know, do you think the protests are justified? They would say things like, did you see the protesters obstruct the entrance to the building? Did you see protesters screaming at passers by? And it was just like they saw a game. What people saw was heavily mediated by their emotional responses to the protest.
If they felt that the protest was justified, they didn't see anybody obstructing the door. They didn't see any screaming. They didn't see any trouble. But if they felt that the protest was unjustified in a cause they disagreed with, then they saw all kinds of infractions and infringements and unacceptable behaviour. So our our perception of what should be objective reality is coloured by our feelings, by our own, by our very identity.
And so the very interesting studies of this, when you present people with ideas about gun control, when you present people with ideas about climate change, when you ask people, did the US army find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or not? Highly partisan issues. And it turns out that people who are in general more informed. So, for example, people who know more about science, better qualified scientists score higher on tests of scientific ability.
You would think when you present them with a scientific question like climate change, the more informed you are, the less your political view should matter. If you're if you don't know anything, then maybe you just fit into your tribe. But when the moment you know something, of course you cleave to the science. But in fact, the opposite is true. So the partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans about climate change is wider among those who have a high degree of scientific literacy,
and it's narrower among those who don't know anything about climate change. Which is disturbing. Now. It was a fascinating study of the backfire effect of the idea if you're going to give people more information about something they really believe strongly about. Conducted by two psychologists, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Riflettere. Jason at Exeter. Brendan Nyhan I think is it.
I think he's at Dartmouth and they've studied this in various contexts, but I think the most famous study was of the flu vaccine, and they said, okay, if a whole bunch of people it turns out that 43% of Americans in the flu vaccine can give you flu. The flu vaccine can't give you flu. Well, I am with my facts. That's not going to work. They want a randomised controlled trial.
I got a whole bunch of people who had, you know, then maybe they were going to vaccinate themselves, maybe they were and they had different feelings about the flu vaccine and they showed some of them the Centres for Disease Control advice on specifically on the misconception that the flu vaccine causes flu. Does the flu vaccine cause flu? No. It turns out the flu vaccine does not cause flu.
Here's why it doesn't cause flu. Here's what it might cause, you know, soreness of the arm, maybe a headache. Here's why that happens. If you have any further, you want more detail. Here are the randomised controlled trials and I'm going to summarise them all but you can click through and read them. Now here's what's interesting. If you give people that information and then you say, okay, you thought that the flu vaccine cause flu.
What do you think? Now people would say, okay, I accept the flu vaccine does not cause flu. Then if you say, okay, all your parents get vaccinated and no way, they were significantly both statistically and practically significantly less likely to express an intention to be vaccinated after they had been shown and accepted the evidence that the flu vaccine doesn't cause flu. And what seems to be going on, I mean, this effect is now under exhaustive examination by psychologists.
Fascinating. What seems to be going on is really my concerns about the flu vaccine. They're not really about does it cause flu? They're about something much deeper about sharp needles or not trusting the government or polluting my body or something. There's something quite primal going on. And when you give me the evidence that flu vaccine doesn't cause flu, and there was a very, very similar study done of MMR and autism and the same thing.
I accept that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. I accept that all of the evidence on that was just junk science. Yeah, I believe you. Are you going to vaccinate your kids? I don't think so. I don't think so, Mr. Scientist. What's going on is, as I give you the information in a narrow way, you accept the information. Okay. I accept that the flu vaccine doesn't cause flu. But then emotionally, I'm thinking of all the reasons I don't want to get that flu vaccine.
I'm fighting back, and subconsciously I'm calling to mind all of the different reasons why I don't want this to be true. So do you think Donald Trump is a sex pest? Absolutely not. Here is tape of Donald Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. Now, do you think he's a sex pest? Okay, now I accept Donald Trump as a sex pest, but my vote for Donald Trump was never about, you know, him being polite to women. It was about he was going to shake Washington up. So you give people a narrow fact.
They accept an hour of fact and then back. They come with all kinds of other reasons because there were always other reasons. Now I'm nine and rightfully by the way, they did run a randomised controlled trial of fact checking. And the good news for my fact checking friends is fact checking probably helps a little bit. Okay. So they they expose people too to to fact check the three months before the 2014 congressional elections in the United States.
So people either got to read regular news or fact checking briefs from sources like PolitiFact and full fact. And it turns out that the fact checking improve people's knowledge. They knew more about the facts. They were better informed about politics. I mean, from an incredibly low level to a low level. But they were better informed. So. So we didn't see direct evidence of the backfire effect yet.
But what we also saw there in that particular randomised controlled trial was the fact checking worked a lot better for people who already had some facts, people who already knew a bit about politics and you give them the facts. They know more. They absorb more when people know very little about politics. The fact checking didn't seem to work at all.
So I don't think the facts are the answer or they're not by themselves the answer when you're faced with people who have a strong reason to believe. And just remembering, again, the case of smoking, who could be more motivated to believe that smoking doesn't cause cancer than somebody who addicted to cigarettes? What could be more fundamental a belief than this thing that I can't stop that I chose to I chose to take up and now I can't stop. It's not really going to kill me.
And by the way, many of the journalists who the tobacco lobby were most effective at using to spread their misinformation were smokers. Of course, motivated reasoning and action. Now mentioning Facebook calls to on this other issue that often comes up, which is the filter bubble, the idea of the filter bubble, the idea that we live in an echo chamber is sort of these people who would say, I can't believe that the country voted to leave the EU.
I've never met anybody who wanted to leave the EU. They where did all these people come from? And, you know, it's it's quite a natural response because, you know, we we do tend to hang around in groups of people who who think like us. Now, Cass Sunstein, one of the co-authors of Nudge, and he was a he was a an official under Barack Obama, a very smart guy. And he wrote years ago about the problem of Echo Chambers online.
He said, the idea is, you know, you could just seek out the more choice you have, the more you tend to seek out people who think exactly like you. And you just talk in your own little bubble to people who think like you. And then Eli Paris, who was a digital activist and now runs the site Upworthy, wrote a book about five years ago now called The Filter Bubble. And the Parasite added something to Cass Sunstein argument.
He said, Not only are we in this bubble, but the algorithms are making it worse. So when I search on Facebook, I was just for my series. Thank you, by the way, alone for recommending 50 things that made the modern economy. You should all subscribe. It's free. I was researching The Plough and I wanted to find out stuff about the plough. You know, I've got some you know, I've got some deep research here, but, you know, some basic facts that's just get a Google around.
And what does the Internet tell me about the plough? And of course, when you type in the plough to Google, it says, here's a popular Oxford called The Plough. Here's another capability of Oxford called the Plough. He's a third property in Oxford called the Plan because it knows I'm in Oxford and it obviously knows how he like to like a beer.
So so Eli Paris his argument is your Google searches and Bing searches and they're all personalised and that can in their quest to show you what you want to see because of course, they want to show you what you want to see. So there's no malice in it that might lead you towards biased sources of information. And the same thing with Facebook. Remember Zuckerberg's claim? I want to show you the content that's most relevant to you. Well, Paris says he's on Facebook.
He's politically active, he's leftwing, but he follows lots of right wing sources because he wants to he wants to be aware of what's going on, but he's clicking like and share on the left wing sources and he's just reading the right wing sources. And Facebook's algorithm seems to go well, they don't seem that excited about these right wing sources. We'll we'll remove those for your feed, don't worry. To show you stuff that's more relevant to you and your interests. Again, no malice in it.
I mean, there's no great Satan in either. They just want to sell adverts, but they're not is not designed to do this. It's a side effect of the algorithm. But again, as with fake news, I think it's worth asking how serious is this problem? It was a fantastic, quite informal study by Emma Pearson, who's based here in Oxford. Maybe I'm as here you maybe not a statistician at Oxford.
And she she studied tweets during the the troubles in Ferguson, a young black man shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri. And then people started tweeting about it because that's what people do. And Pearson analysed all the tweets and she said, okay, the red tweets and the blue tweets and the red tweets say, you know, this is looting and, you know, outrageous disorder. And the police are responding in the right way.
And by the way, that police officer was framed and the guy he shot had it coming in the right tweet and then the blue tweets, which like this is this is noble protest. It's not a riot, it's not looting. It's it's principled civil disobedience. The police response is outrageous and disproportionate and blah, blah, blah. No, no contact. No contact at all. I mean, we have all this complaints about Twitter trolls and of course, Twitter trolls are a problem.
But the real problem is these people were not talking to each other at all, just retweeting each other. The blue tweets are retweeting the blue tweets, the right tweets to be true to the red tweets. But here's what's interesting. When you think about Eli, Paris's filter bubble thesis, the algorithms make it worse. Twitter didn't have an algorithm in the summer of 2014 when this was all happening. This is all purely based on our choices who are friends and who we hung around with.
And Facebook have studied. They said, you know, probably something in science, which is a respected journal, but it is internal research from Facebook. Facebook argues that the algorithm does politically filter. That is a side effect of the algorithm, but it's quite modest compared with the way that we politically filter by just following people who think like us.
And there's been other studies of this. Seth Flaxman, who's a statistician here in Oxford and a couple of colleagues have tried to study this. They got a 1.2 million browser users and just check what news they were reading and. These were Microsoft browsers that were sharing data. The people that agreed to share data with Microsoft. So the question is, well, what use do you read when you just type in F.T. dot com or BBC News dot bbc.co.uk or guardian echo dot UK?
When you type that into your browser versus if you search for a story overseas, if you click through from social media. Which which method of reading news is more polarised. And they found there was a small polarisation effect from Google searches. Bing searches from social media was not that big. And also which means basically if you click from social media, you're more likely either to be served with.
If you're if you tend right, you'll be served with right wing stories. If you tend to left, you'll be served with left wing sources. There's more polarisation, but also you're more likely to be shown sources for the opposing point of view. I mean, the thing is, what is what is a filter bubble? If I mean, if the Guardian or the F.T. or The Times, I mean, they're all filter bubbles. The Daily Mail is a filter bubble. They're all filter bubbles reading one newspaper.
I mean, it should be the Financial Times, obviously, but of course, you you know, you're just exposed to a particular viewpoint and you're relying on the editors of the newspaper to expose you to alternative ways of seeing the world. So they found that actually there wasn't a massive amount of polarisation for people clicking from social media, and there was arguably more diversity if you did get your news from social media.
All of which suggests the filter bubble. It may be a it may be a problem in the future. It's not a huge problem yet. But you know what is a huge problem? Just a little detail in the footnotes of of the Flaxman study. There's 1.2 million users that they were examining to see how they consume their news online. In order to actually be analysed for filter bubble behaviour, you had to consume ten news stories and two op ed pieces a month and those sports stories didn't count.
You want to guess how many of the 1.2 million people read ten news stories in two or PEDs a month? 50,044%. The other 96%. Yeah, they had a filter bubble. The filter bubble is don't read the news. So I think I think we have we have bigger problems. We have bigger problems in the filter bubble. And to the extent that there is a filter bubble in the way we consume news, it's it's us. It's our friends and how we're influenced by our friends. We can't blame Facebook.
We have to blame ourselves. Just a thought, by the way, on smoking. Smoking is socially contagious. Smoking itself exists in a filter bubble and quitting is socially contagious. There's a wonderful study by David Cutler, an adviser to economists who study what happens when you've got a husband and wife who both smoke and one of them is affected by a workplace ban on smoking? It makes it more difficult for him or her to smoke. That doesn't in any way affect the other smoker.
And they found this enormous effect. If your spouse finds it more difficult to smoke, you are highly likely to quit smoking. So smoking a play is part of a filter bubble as well. So. If. If part of the problem if a major part of the problem is basically just people are not that interested. It's not the filter bubble, it's not motivated reasoning. It's just people just out broadly don't care about any of this stuff.
They don't care about the facts. They're not interested. Well, what would we expect to see by people who want to mislead us? We would expect to see not lies so much as distraction. We would expect to see arguments about whether Donald Trump owns a bathrobe or not. We would expect to see arguments about whether the crowd at Donald Trump's inauguration was bigger than the crowd at Barack Obama's inauguration or not.
Fortunately, none of these things has come to pass. People are really focusing on the issues that matter. There's a wonderful new study been published of the 50 Cent AMI and we know who the 50 cent AMI he were Chinese. You would know the 50 cent Armijo. So the 50 cent AMI are allegedly. People who have paid $0.50 an hour to talk up the Chinese government on Chinese social media.
So reportedly, tens of millions of people paid by the government to basically just make spread propaganda on social media favourable to the Chinese government. This fantastic study. It's like a, you know, a spy novel reading this works. At first they managed to get hold of a big data leak of loads and loads of people in the 50 Cent Army sending screenshots of their work to a government office saying,
I've been posting all this propaganda. Can I have my money now? There was this big leak of all this data. So they're able to identify people who were employed by the government. And then they they had this fishing expedition where they managed to persuade these people that they were also in the 50 cent army. And could they give them some advice about the best kind of posts to make? And they were just able to track exactly what the strategies were and what posts were being made when.
And the bottom line of this study is a lot of this stuff was not the propaganda you might expect. It was not people arguing against dissidents. It was not people straightforwardly lying about what the government was doing or attacking people who told the truth about what the government was doing.
What it was instead was people changing the subject, talking about this cool movie that was on TV last night or celebrations, the Chinese New Year coming up talking about the Chinese New Year or just just creating noise, just creating a distraction, anything to prevent us focusing on the issue. Which is interesting, I think. Then we know who Stanley Prisoner is. He has a Nobel Prize. It's a medicine, though.
I mean, obviously there's no Nobel Prize in maths. Stanley Peacenik got the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering prions. So prions are this rogue protein that cause codes failed. Jakob disease in mad cow disease and. Saudi prison had just started investigating this in 1972, had a patient who had quite scaled back up disease. Nobody knew what caused it. And there were similar sorts of diseases out there, like scraping sheep.
And the theory was it was some kind of really, really slow acting virus. And scientists kept looking for the virus in looking for the virus, looking for the virus. And they could never find the virus. And prisoner was looking for the virus. Looking for the virus, and he couldn't find the virus. And in the end, he discovered it's not a virus. It's a protein. A protein causes this condition. Which is insane.
And everybody told him it was insane and that he was a crackpot and he was gradually marginalised and his funding was withdrawn and the whole sort of story about these scientific heroes. But. He managed to find a source of funding to continue his work. R.J. Reynolds, makers of camel cigarettes. Here is the story, the secret he made. He thanks them in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The discovery of the cause of mad cow disease and quixotic disease.
The Nobel Prize winning discovery was funded by big tobacco. And this is in no way a slant on Sunday proves no. I've got no argument with Sandy presenter he's a great, truly great scientist and as far as I'm concerned, he's never said a word about tobacco, nothing. He's not interested in it. But you know what's interesting about prions? They are not the new story. Cigarettes cause cancer.
There is something new and different and interesting. And one of the things the tobacco lobby did was to find all kinds of interesting research. Maybe lung cancer is caused by a fungus. There is a fungus that does seem to mimic the conditions of lung cancer. You have a sick building syndrome. Tobacco industry. I'm not saying there's no such thing as sick building syndrome. It seems a bit vague to me, but the point is, doesn't really matter whether it's true or false.
It's not cigarettes cause cancer, it's something else. So I spoke to Robert Proctor, who's a historian who studies this. He told me that ten Nobel Prizes have been awarded to scientists who basically were funded by the tobacco industry. And they're not they're not kind of junk science. They're not trying to cast doubt on the claim of cigarettes. They're just something else to talk about. They're just a distraction, something new.
And Robert Proctor said, what's going on here with a lot of these news stories says the opposite of terrorism. Terrorism is getting getting excited about a risk that isn't that big. Getting upset about it isn't that big. So the opposite of terrorism is trivial ism. It's managing to distract people from a huge risk and get them to look at something else. And that's what happened with tobacco. You know, I mean, we still know that cigarettes cause cancer.
It's perhaps the the most or among the most important facts about our health today. It's still one of the most important facts about our health. Do you know how often we mention it in the news? Not very often. Because it's not you. It's not you. We do sometimes mention it more or less because that's how we roll, but not very often. So I've told you that. Just debunking. Doesn't necessarily work. Just debunking can backfire. It can reinforce myths.
It can confuse people. It can create a backfire effect where people fight back so hard, they don't want to listen to what you're saying. I've told you that actually a lot of the problem is not the fact that people believe false things. A lot of the problem is that people are just not paying any attention at all, not interested in the facts. They have some feelings that I want. Pesky facts. Is there a solution?
What? I said if fact checking is part of the solution. But FactCheck is just the foundation of the solution. Is there a solution? Maybe there is. So Dan Kahan of Yale, published just a couple of weeks ago, a paper looking at this whole question of people who know stuff about science and what they believe about climate change and the existing finding. Remember, if you know more about science, then the polarisation is wider.
Republicans and Democrats are further apart in their beliefs about climate change if they're more informed about science. So Duncan mentioned something else. Curiosity. Like, What do we want to know? How interested are we in surprising results? We measure it in all kinds of ways. He asked people how often they read science books. He asked people if they if they enjoyed watching science documentaries, nature documentaries, that sort of thing.
It turns out interest in science is distributed across the political spectrum. Republicans are just interested in science as Democrats. And interest in science is correlated with scientific knowledge, but it's not that closely correlated with scientific knowledge. You can be curious and not really know a lot and you can know quite a lot and not be very curious. And then having established this measure of curiosity, he asked, Well, do we have the same polarisation or not?
And he found, No. I mean, Republicans are still more sceptical about climate change than Democrats. But consistently the more curious both of them are they move in lockstep. They get more and more concerned. The more the more curious they are, the more concerned they get about climate change.
And there are various other studies that are starting to suggest that interest in the scientific method, an interest in where facts come from, how scientists work, maybe even how economists work or even how statisticians work, might be more productive than just hammering people with the facts. So what I'm really saying is we need to make people care about the truth, not just give them the truth, but make them want to know, make them curious, make them ask questions.
We need to encourage that. That spirit of adventure, that curiosity. What we basically need. It's the Brian Cox of Statistics, Economics, Politics and Social Science. Yesterday. He died. So Hans Rosling was the most amazing scientific communicator. I saw him speak many times. You get this amazing TEDx talk that's been seen zillions of times with beautiful bubbles floating all over the place and the amazing data visualisation.
He also swallowed swords. He also gave a fantastic demonstration of demography with with just a pile of toilet rolls, one on top of another. And it wasn't just kind of a fancy prop it. I really did understand demographic change in the process. Demographic change. Having seen Hans Rosling messing around with toilet rolls and the other thing he did.
So he wasn't afraid to give people a real bollocking if he felt that they were asking questions that just came from a place of ignorance and and to encourage them. You can't you have to inform yourself about the world and what you want. Hans was interested in was what he called fact fulness. He's not interested in making an argument. I'm just interested in giving you the facts. That's what he said. But that wasn't quite true. He was never just giving us the facts. He was bringing them to life.
He was making us realise that they were important, that they matter to us, mattered to making us better people, making us better citizens, better voters, understanding the world around us. And he made them an absolute joy. He made you want to find out more. That's what we need more of. We're going to miss him. Thanks very much for listening.