Yves here. This article’s focus on “misinformation,” which is a trigger word in right-leaning circles, may fatally undermine readers giving it a fair hearing. After all “misinformation” is particularly strongly associated with Biden-era efforts to enforce Covid orthodoxies, like “If you are vaccinated, you won’t get or spread Covid” as well as masking, which actually is sound but then Rochelle Walensky undercut that by depicting masks as a scarlet letter demonstrating that you had not been vaxxed. Of course, the PMC that loves to attack opponents as purveyors or victims of misinformation has abundant blind spots of their own, starting with the fact that many still believe in Russiagate.
Nevertheless, the study in question does seem to have limited itself to seriously factually-challenged positions to test how participants react to misinformation. The article has an awfully wordy formulation, but it seems to amount to finding that those who rejected Covid directives as “Don’t tell me what to do” were also willing to accept dodgy information claims, as a form of proof of their independence. This does align with the very weird resistance to masking by some, as if it were a personal affront. But that isn’t even remotely the case in Asia, where masking is seen as polite and just about everyone was on board with Covid interventions, in large measure to SARS-1 having been deadly (10% mortality rate) and the official actions then seen as effective.
However, one has to question if these findings are generally true. The official Covid response including substantial quarantines and other restrictions, so its scope went well beyond a messaging campaign. Would the conclusions be different on topics where there was not history of marked government restriction on individuals
And in addition, is this misinformation reflex peculiar to America? Per the discussion of SARS-1 and Covid in Asia, are Americans more tetchy about muscular official action?
By Randy Stein, Associate Professor of Marketing, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and Abraham Rutchick, Professor of Psychology, California State University, Northridge. Originally published at The Conversation
Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong.
Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods.
We are social psychologists who study political psychology and how people reason about reality. During the pandemic, we surveyed 5,535 people across eight countries to investigate why people believed COVID-19 misinformation, like false claims that 5G networks cause the virus.
The strongest predictor of whether someone believed in COVID-19-related misinformation and risks related to the vaccine was whether they viewed COVID-19 prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength and weakness. In other words, this group focused on whether an action would make them appear to fend off or “give in” to untoward influence.
This factor outweighed how people felt about COVID-19 in general, their thinking style and even their political beliefs.
Our survey measured it on a scale of how much people agreed with sentences including “Following coronavirus prevention guidelines means you have backed down” and “Continuous coronavirus coverage in the media is a sign we are losing.” Our interpretation is that people who responded positively to these statements would feel they “win” by endorsing misinformation – doing so can show “the enemy” that it will not gain any ground over people’s views.
When Meaning Is Symbolic, Not Factual
Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go.
When people think symbolically this way, the literal issue – here, fighting COVID-19 – is secondary to a psychological war over people’s minds. In the minds of those who think they’re engaged in them, psychological wars are waged over opinions and attitudes, and are won via control of belief and messaging. The U.S. government at various times has used the concept of psychological war to try to limit the influence of foreign powers, pushing people to think that literal battles are less important than psychological independence.
By that same token, vaccination, masking or other COVID-19 prevention efforts could be seen as a symbolic risk that could “weaken” one psychologically even if they provide literal physical benefits. If this seems like an extreme stance, it is – the majority of participants in our studies did not hold this mindset. But those who did were especially likely to also believe in misinformation.
In an additional study we ran that focused on attitudes around cryptocurrency, we measured whether people saw crypto investment in terms of signaling independence from traditional finance. These participants, who, like those in our COVID-19 study, prioritized a symbolic show of strength, were more likely to believe in other kinds of misinformation and conspiracies, too, such as that the government is concealing evidence of alien contact.
In all of our studies, this mindset was also strongly associated with authoritarian attitudes, including beliefs that some groups should dominate others and support for autocratic government. These links help explain why strongman leaders often use misinformation symbolically to impress and control a population.
Why People Endorse Misinformation
Our findings highlight the limits of countering misinformation directly, because for some people, literal truth is not the point.
For example, President Donald Trump incorrectly claimed in August 2025 that crime in Washington D.C. was at an all-time high, generating countless fact-checks of his premise and think pieces about his dissociation from reality.
But we believe that to someone with a symbolic mindset, debunkers merely demonstrate that they’re the ones reacting, and are therefore weak. The correct information is easily available, but is irrelevant to someone who prioritizes a symbolic show of strength. What matters is signaling one isn’t listening and won’t be swayed.
In fact, for symbolic thinkers, nearly any statement should be justifiable. The more outlandish or easily disproved something is, the more powerful one might seem when standing by it. Being an edgelord – a contrarian online provocateur – or outright lying can, in their own odd way, appear “authentic.”
Some people may also view their favorite dissembler’s claims as provocative trolling, but, given the link between this mindset and authoritarianism, they want those far-fetched claims acted on anyway. The deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, for example, can be the desired end goal, even if the offered justification is a transparent farce.
Is This Really 5-D Chess?
It is possible that symbolic, but not exactly true, beliefs have some downstream benefit, such as serving as negotiation tactics, loyalty tests, or a fake-it-till-you-make-it long game that somehow, eventually, becomes a reality. Political theorist Murray Edelman, known for his work on political symbolism, noted that politicians often prefer scoring symbolic points over delivering results – it’s easier. Leaders can offer symbolism when they have little tangible to provide.
Seems to be they are having great trouble discovering the sky is blue.
First the weird idea that there are symbolic thinkers and non-symbolic ones. People are all symbolic creatures, there’s no other kind, and the symbolic overrides every other part of our makeup. People are willing to die, be tortured and outcast, and suffer all sorts of other nasty things for their symbols, be that their religion, country, friends, family, honour, principles, or whatever. And then there is someone surprised that someone would refuse a mask that is pushed by your sworn political enemy to take care of an abstract threat on which the pusher cannot even get their story straight. No shit, no Sherlock.
When you walk up to someone, and tell them they are wrong about something, they will go into defence mode. The harder you insist, the harder they defend.
This is multiplied by having any emotions at play.
And again multiplied by having a group identity at play. And group identity is a very base thing, people are tribal at core, and will go to great lengths to belong. And a big part of group identity is believing the right things. And more often than not those right things are if not necessarily incorrect, then at least not correct either. Any of us will find this to be true in our own groups, too, if we only care to take a look. Because anyone can believe the correct thing, you cannot tell a friend from foe based on that. But to maintain and actually believe an incorrect thing solves that problem. It also works as a handicap principle, and maybe most importantly, collective suffering in the name of shared belief builds group solidarity like nothing else.
Now the end result is, if someone gets attached enough to some idea, they will ride it all the way, and any confrontation is only going to reinforce that idea. Search your experience, you will find you have done the same. People will go to the greatest lengths to maintain their worldview. Almost no amount of rationalization is too much to keep holding on. Because the further in you are, the deeper and hollower the abyss feels under you, should you even think about letting go. It is only when life kicks you from a completely unexpected angle and sends you flying, or when at some point you discover a sheer weight of nonthreatening facts have found their way in and unbalanced your scales, that you find you have to start again.
It’s because people are rewarded for the reification of social relations as things, which become property with all the drama that entails. Theoretically this state of affairs is subject to change, if only y’all would stop molesting people with autism.
There’s mis and dis-information aplenty
What’s absent from every discussion since year zero, is the ‘missing’ information
As in results of trials and studies both before and since mandates, or heaven forbid, side effects and inexplicable increases in long term averages for many illnesses……
Some might wonder how social psychologists, marketing and psychology professors in particular, manage to ignore the obvious!
One need only look at the assumptions, deductive reasoning and asserted mythematical models that are not tested against empirical evidence which have been the stock in trade of neoclassical economists, not to mention so many of the “ideas” awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (cough, cough), to realise how self-delusional humans are as a species. If they will not look, have no inquisitiveness to investigate their modeled outcomes against real world evidence, then they are just like Trump 1.0 where in relation to Covid-19 “if you don’t test, you don’t have any cases” and “if we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
Ignorance as a badge of honour.
On the one hand, I believe that human behaviour is more or less constant over time. The same positive and negative powers that move people are there everywhere. There I would assume (at the risk of making an ass of you and me) that this attitude has been around since forever.
On the other hand, people are not stupid and have seen and, more importantly, experienced the mental and moral decline of the political and economic elite, especially under the neoliberal “go die” regime and its crappifying and mortal implication for life in general, meaning that the trust levels may have sunk considerably strengthening the reactions described above and similar and the scale and scope of this reaction could be larger nowadays. Don’t we have the same problem with the Ukraine war?
Upon first reading of this piece, I am reminded of a quote that I came across, somewhere…
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
Yellow waders don’t seem like enough these days.
I don’t have free access to academic journals anymore so I was not able to check the details of the actual study. I’m always interested in what researchers in such studies assume is “easily provable” or “literally true,” and how their key variables are operationalized. But based on what I read here, this just sounds like another condemnation of unthinking authoritarian deplorables by fact-loving, objective scientists.
I don’t doubt their basic findings. We all know that beliefs about COVID and *especially* the vaccines were politicized and have become badges of identity – “symbols,” if you will. But I still think the qualifications Yves lays out in her introduction are more important than the “findings” of studies like this. For one thing, as J states above, like most such studies they go to great scientistic lengths to state the obvious. But for another, also like most such studies, they think their tribe is above such biases. They are not.
Consider this passage:
“Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go.”
I immediately thought back to the article by Lucy Komisar posted by Yves on Tuesday, the one with the ridiculous statements on Ukraine by John Sullivan and Hillary Clinton. The statement that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is about as easy to disprove as any I can think of (doubters are invited to read Scott Horton’s book ‘Provoked’ which is chock full of “actual facts”), I would say much easier to prove than the statement “COVID vaccines are safe and effective.” I remember how disheartening it was to see journalist Jane Mayer “prove” that Russian interference likely cost Hillary the 2016 election in the New Yorker. Two of her three key sources were those impeccable fountains of “literal truth” John Brennan and James Clapper. But the third, held up as real objective science, was a study by esteemed academic Kathleen Hall Jamieson that was as flawed and one-sided as the one profiled here.
The basic argument of the authors is summed up in this passage, which is the common warning in such research of this sort:
“In all of our studies, this mindset was also strongly associated with authoritarian attitudes, including beliefs that some groups should dominate others and support for autocratic government. These links help explain why strongman leaders often use misinformation symbolically to impress and control a population.”
I take such a warning seriously. But I would extend it to all the tribes. Ask different questions about different topics and see who resists facts to avoid “giving in” or “losing.” It is interesting how political psychologists can recognize in-group/out-group biases in every group but their own.
These links help explain why strongman leaders often use misinformation symbolically to impress and control a population.
Cute how the authors sneak in a literal link to a 2015 book about Russian media by a Ukrainian-born Brit now hard at work in Kyiv—when not in London lecturing on Russian propaganda or confabbing with the Atlantic Council—documenting Russian war crimes. No selection bias there! Talk about fouling the research nest. Yeesh.
LOL! Even though I used the quote I did not click on that link. What a telling reference – one might even call it “symbolic”! Thanks for pointing this out.
I think I’ve read that one, actually. The observational parts (when he was writing about his experiences living in Russia and the people he talked to) weren’t bad, although obviously limited by perspective.
Most people involved in foreign policy for NATO countries – including possibly the author himself, by now – would probably reject the idea that there’s anything to be gained from experiencing Russia as a resident and learning about it from within. I think the modern view is that everything you need to know about Russia can be learned from Western experts, think tanks, academics and politicians, and that if you make any attempt to consult primary sources you risk being corrupted by ‘propaganda’.
Can edgelords survive without all the edgeserfs?
Social media’s ongoing challenge.
Yet another article documenting how it’s right leaning types with a tendency to authoritarianism who believe in “misinformation”. No mention of all the people who believe vaccines will stop covid in its tracks because our political leadership explicitly stated that whopper a few years back, or all the people who think the Russians did it because their favorite media told them so.
People believe things that are not true because other people want power and propaganda works as a way to get it.
Not particularly about mis/disinformation, but I’ve seen a lot of people having problems with tail risk, especially in public health. The “99% are okay” idea implying the 1% don’t matter is widespread. The goal in health is to reduce all diseases that are preventable in the least inconvenient way.
After all, most people survived the plague in the middle ages. Before vaccination, measles and polio risks had to be accepted. Now the (relatively) rare but devastating consequences don’t have to be accepted..
It’s not just bad actors promulgating bad information, the bad actors also encourage cognitive errors.