We know that social media platforms have an incentive to promote whatever gets the most attention, regardless of its authenticity. We’re more reluctant to admit that the same is true of people.
What’s the role of someone who, like
Robert Mueller, speaks only facts in a tornado of partisan bombast? Is it a breath of fresh air or an abdication of responsibility to protect America’s interests?
Psychological phenomena like confirmation bias and the Dunning-Kruger effect make it easy for people to fall for deliberate or inadvertent lies in the news.
Michael Cohen wants you to know that throwing your kid a ball doesn’t make you a Red Sox pitcher. So he told lies, he says, but that doesn’t make him a liar. A rhetoric scholar dissects his argument.
Online lies can often be easy to detect, by searching for images and phone numbers and exploring social media profiles. Some people lie anyway – and countless others take the bait.
While Donald Trump’s election may seem to US voters to present unprecedented questions of legitimacy, such questions were first asked more than a century ago, in an election that turned on bicycles.
How did Trump came to be a symbol of national pride for evangelical Protestants who value strict morality and good manners? It has to do with their shared master narrative of white power and domination.
There’s no need for parents to bust the Santa myth. Children figure out the truth themselves, at a developmentally appropriate time. In the process, they build their reasoning skills.
Alternate realities don’t just exist in politics – and not all falsehoods are lies. Distortions of the truth can range from a normal part of human nature to pathological.
Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Associate Research Professor, Political Science, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn State
Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Lecturer on Bioethics & Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University; and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine; Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Psychiatric Times., Tufts University