The #Pizzagate story is a depressing blend of conspiracy theory and instinctive thinking. That toxic concoction inspired Edgar Welch to drive from his North Carolina home to a pizza joint in Washington, D.C. and storm inside with an assault rifle Sunday, looking for the child sex slaves hidden in secret chambers for the amusement of Hillary Clinton and her friends.
As the excellent Washington Post feature on the Citizen's website and in Wednesday's print edition shows, fake news isn't just for some lunatic fringe that has nothing else to do but rummage through the online sewer for ridiculous drivel.
It is real, it is touching millions of people around the world and it is inspiring otherwise decent individuals into adopting bizarre beliefs and putting themselves and others in great danger in the process.
As numerous recent books on decision making, such as Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, explain in rich detail, our gut instincts make most decisions quickly, emotionally, independently and invisibly from our conscious mind. Furthermore, our conscious mind is less often a sober second thought and more commonly a mechanism to rationalize the gut instinct choice already made.
Gut instinct says eat some Christmas baking. Conscious mind says I know I shouldn't but I can have the Christmas baking because Christmas only comes once a year, I did well at the gym today, I had a good day, I had a bad day and so on.
If gut instinct says Clinton is a bad person, it will take a significant amount of evidence, as well as conscious effort, to change that view. The mind has a much easier time collecting evidence to support what the gut has already decided and the more powerful the evidence sounds, the more justifiable the viewpoint. Notice there is no mention of the reliability or validity of the evidence, only that it exists and it confirms a pre-existing belief.
That's confirmation bias at its most basic form.
The details still matter, however, because they provide a narrative to hold the beliefs up.
The evidence has to be both outlandish and believable. Secret chambers hidden in plain sight to molest and torture children for years sounds crazy except that a number of serial killers and longtime abductions have happened the same way. So it's not too crazy.
Special treatment for the rich and powerful and money exchanging hands to buy the silence and/or support of journalists and police officers also happens often enough that it could be going on again. And even if it isn't 100 per cent accurate, who cares?
The broad strokes are true and the intent - save the kids from abuse - is sound. Stephen Colbert called this kind of thinking truthiness and Donald Trump referred to it as truthful hyperbole.
Conspiracy theories work because the brain prefers the comfort of a ridiculous tall, but straightforward, tale that explains everything over the dull, complex facts that are open to interpretation and uncertainty.
That's why there are people that don't believe climate change is happening, that vaccines cause autism and that evolution is "just a theory."
All of these fall under a belief originating from fear of science, reinforced with stories of when doctors and researchers got it wrong and people were hurt as a result, pointing to everything from DDT to thalidomide.
The good news about fake news, however, is it also engages another powerful gut instinct. No one wants to be publicly shamed as the gullible sucker proved wrong.
If the outcome of the rise of fake news and the continued warnings about scams is a probing cynicism towards new information, that's a positive. Questioning everything, especially what you think you already know is real, is healthy, although it asks the conscious mind to work much harder than it would like.
Curiosity requires the mind to stay vigilant, to accept both truths and uncertainty at the same time. Certainty allows the mind to defer to gut instinct and emotional reaction, to accept a reality because it feels true.
For Welch, it seemed so right to grab his gun and drive hundreds of miles to rescue abused kids.
It's both sad and frightening, however, to think that there are people out there who think Welch is a government-sponsored patsy, or he just didn't look hard enough to find and save those poor, abused kids.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
