How to Trust Your Brain Online
Co-hosts Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez explore the web’s effects on our brains and how narrative, repetition, and even a focus on replaying memories can muddy our ability to separate fact from fiction. How do we come to believe the things we do? Why do conspiracy theories flourish? And how can we train our brains to recognize misinformation online? Lisa Fazio, an associate psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, explains how people process information and disinformation, and how to debunk and pre-bunk in ways that can help discern the real from the fake.
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Andrea Valdez: When I was growing up, I always believed that bluebonnets, which are the Texas state flower where I live, that they’re illegal to pick in Texas. And this is something that I feel like so many people very firmly believe. You hear it all the time: You cannot pick the state flower, the bluebonnet. And come to find out when I was an adult that there actually is no state law to this effect. I was 100 percent convinced of this as a fact. And I bet if you poll an average Texan, there’s going to be probably a healthy contingent of them that also believe it’s a fact. So sometimes we just internalize these bits of information. They kind of come from somewhere; I don’t know where. And they just, they stick with you.
Megan Garber: Oh, that’s so interesting. So not quite a false memory, but a false sense of reality in the present. Something like that. Wow. And I love it too, because it protects the flowers. So hey, that’s great. Not a bad side effect.
Valdez: Yeah.
Garber: Not a bad side effect.
Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.
Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic.
Valdez: And this is How to Know What’s Real.
Garber: Andrea, you know, lots of mistakes like that are commonly shared. One of them I think about sometimes involves Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, who a lot of people became convinced that he had died in the 1980s, when he was in prison. But of course he didn’t die in the 1980s. He died in 2013. But the misconception was so common that researchers began to talk about the quote unquote “Mandela effect” to describe, I think, what we’re talking about: these false memories that somehow become shared and somehow become communal. And they’re often really low-stakes things. You know, like how many people remember the line from Star Wars? I hope this is not a spoiler, but the line from Star Wars isn’t “Luke, I am your father”—which is definitely what I thought the line was.
Valdez: Of course. Everybody does.
Yeah. But do you know what it is, actually? Because it’s not that.
