Generally speaking, truth seeking for us humans is less important than showing our in-group that we stand with them. A recent study for instance found: “Interventions that solely emphasize sharing accurately may fail to curb misinformation because users may share outrageous, inaccurate content to signal their moral positions or loyalty to political groups.”
Fact-speaking vs belief-speaking
Nevertheless, quite a proposed interventions to deal with mis- and disinformation rely on the primacy of accuracy: for instance fact-checking (level one of beliefs: information incidents), debunking (level two of beliefs: information campaigns), media literacy (level three of beliefs: rationality). Stephan Lewandowsky calls discourses based on the primacy of accuracy ‘fact-speaking’.
Lewandowsky tells us that a second type of discourse is needed in a productive democratic debate: belief-speaking. According to Lewandowsky, for belief-speakers it is not facts but inner states that are the basis of reasoning. Feelings, instincts, personal values, one’s gut, common sense, and intuition are seen as crucial. Some types of interventions rely on the primacy of inner states: for instance confronting one’s thinking with one’s experiences (level four: meta-cognition), improving one’s psychosocial integration (level five: prophylactics), and focusing on getting individuals out of extremist groups (level six: (de-)radicalisation).
Importance of the two discourse types
According to Lewandowsky, fact-speaking is important because it makes politics transparent, accountable, and leads to informed decision-making. Among fact-speakers a shared understanding of reality exists, which leads to social cohesion. And, in case of a dispute, facts and evidence can help find a solution.
Belief-speaking is important because it signals how real people experience facts. Belief-speakers give a voice to currents that cannot be simply derived from available data. They help us explore social challenges, and offer us a first step towards solving them.
Downsides of the two discourses
Fact-speaking is seen by a part of the belief-speakers as elitist, exclusive, oppressive, and wrong. In its most extreme form, fact-speaking leads to a technocracy in which procedures and institutions take precedence over actual people and can inflict serious harm. Yosha Mounk calls this ‘undemocratic liberalism’.
Belief-speaking can lead to an unbounded constructivism: since only what an individual feels is true, politics gets detached from the observable reality, and individuals from each other. Unbridled belief-speaking is accompanied by democratic backsliding as a result of democratic norm violations by political elites in the name of representing the gut of the people. It opens the door for populists to ignore democratic traditions, grab power, and spread misleading claims and false information, especially about political opponents. Yosha Mounk calls this ‘illiberal democracy’.
Affective polarisation
In our current times of affective polarisation, both discourses worsen the existing polarisation. Extreme proponents of fact-speaking accuse belief-speakers of being gullible and easily manipulable by wannabe dictators. Extreme proponents of belief-speaking accuse fact-speakers of being power-hungry traitors to their own people.
The essence of affective polarisation is that a normal distinction between our in-group and others has turned moralistic. While it is normal to like our in-group better than we like others, it isn’t given that we should dislike those outside our in-group. Van Bavel & Packer (The Power of Us, p. 32) explain: “When relations between groups harden and we start to see “our” interest as fundamentally opposed to “their” interests, the natural positive emotions and empathy we feel towards our own group can shift in a dangerous direction. We start to think that we’re not only good but inherently good. And if that’s true, then they must be intrinsically bad and must be opposed at all costs. Issues become moralized in ways that favor our point of view. … We begin to believe that when it comes to pursuing our group’s interests, any means justify the ends.”
‘Is’ vs ‘ought’
As was described in the draft module on how beliefs form, our beliefs are the result of causal patterns we start seeing around us. Based on our experiences, we start to formulate and test causal predictions. But, as we saw in the draft module on sustaining beliefs, we also start to identify with our predicted outcomes. We start to favor any information that shows us our predictions were correct, and see anything that shows us our predictions were wrong as threatening. Instead of observing what ‘is’, we start to see around us what ‘ought’ to happen – our confirmation bias.
In a situation of affective polarisation, that what ‘ought’ to happen becomes groupish and ruthless. We start to see any other outcome than what ought to happen as a threat against both our individual and our group identity. And we are willing to defend ourselves with any means possible. This is why accuracy matters less to us than signalling to our in-group that we stand with them.
The problem is that it makes no sense. That what ‘ought’ to be done cannot be simply derived from what ‘is’ and what ‘is’ does not follow from what ‘ought’ to be done. That what ‘is’ is descriptive, that what ‘ought’ is prescriptive. Undemocratic liberalism is not the logical outcome of fact-speaking and neither is illiberal democracy the logical outcome of belief-speaking. Just wanting to be right is no good ground for defining what ‘ought’ to happen.
Resilience Councils
As I wrote in my previous blog post, Resilience Councils lean heavily on the ‘fact speaking’ perspective and its primacy of accuracy. This is reflected in the European Commission definition of disinformation as being: “verifiably false or misleading information that is created, presented, and disseminated for economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public, and that may cause public harm” (cf. Guidelines for teachers and educators on tackling disinformation and promoting digital literacy through education and training, p.8). This definition both accepts the primacy of accuracy (as opposed to “verifiably false or misleading information”) and the possibility that gullible members of the general public can be “deceived”.
But detecting mis- and disinformation that ‘is’ does not lead to an automatic direction of how we ‘ought’ to react. The description does not automatically lead to a prescription. If we would stay in a fact-speaking bubble, our confirmation bias would help convince ourselves that we know what ‘ought’ to be done. In reality, we would rather be defending our in-group and signal to them that we stand with them. We would also feel emboldened to defend ourselves against the ‘belief-speaking’ part of our society. Instead of strengthening our resilience against mis- and disinformation, we would start a civil war against our fellow citizens, whose mode of thinking is crucial in our democratic debate.
That is why I proposed in my previous blog post to create additional organisations in which individuals can formulate their opinions without fear of judgment while learning to listen without judgment. We need to base our ‘ought’ on as many different voices as we can, to avoid falling for our confirmation biases. We need a ‘we’ attitude, not a ‘them’ attitude, as I wrote in an earlier blog post. We need to democratise the process of formulating our ‘ought’. That is the essence of the Resilience Councils.
'Is' and 'ought' organisations
The organisations I described in the thought experiment blog post are a mixture of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ organisations. Local RCs and national, advisory RCs are ‘is’ organisations: they are concerned with detecting and describing mis- and disinformation campaigns and trends. The national, strategic RC is an ‘ought’ organisation: it concerns itself with how to deal with mis- and disinformation. For the ‘ought’ RC it is not enough to receive descriptions of reality. It also needs to know how people experience this reality and what it means to them.
Giving the two discourses a place
It is not easy to create an organisation in which both ‘belief-speakers’ and ‘fact-speakers’ feel they can speak their mind without turning moralistic, especially in our times of high affective polarisation.
In our educational method Interdemocracy, my wife and I try to give the two types of discourses a place in the classroom. Concretely, we implement two axioms:
• Don’t discuss facts: Use facts and evidence as a reliable frame of what ‘is’ but focus in your communication on how these facts are experienced or what they mean for people.
• Don't use anecdotes to present facts: Using anecdotes would open the discussion to anecdotes by all. This in turn would open a backdoor for an unwanted discussion concerning facts and evidence.
Concretely this means that we separate factual introductions from any kind of dialogue. The facts are the facts for all, but we need to talk about how the facts are experienced, what they mean to us, and what should be done with the situation the facts describe. Only then we can slowly start to formulate an ‘ought’.
But to be able to formulate an ‘ought’ we need more than the skills of formulating our opinions without fear of judgment and of listening without judgment. For that we would need what Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid life, p. 125) calls ‘citizen skills’: skills “of conducting a dialogue, of negotiation, of gaining mutual understanding and of managing or resolving conflicts inevitable in every instance of shared life”.
