Truth Decay: A Tale of Decreasing Trust in Institutions
Jennifer Kavanagh, Associate Director, RAND Corporation, and Co-author of the report ‘Truth Decay’
At RAND, we are studying Truth Decay — the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis appear to play in our political and civil discourse and the policymaking process. We define Truth Decay as comprising four trends: an increasing disagreement about objective facts and data, blurring of the line between fact and opinion, an increasing relative volume of opinion compared to fact, and decreasing trust in institutions that used to be looked to as sources of factual information. While our work thus far has focused on the United States, Truth Decay is a global phenomenon and these trends exist in Europe as well.
The example of vaccine scepticism is one example of this phenomenon. Despite an overwhelming amount of evidence in support of both the safety and the efficacy of vaccines, an increasing number of people in the United States and Europe are sceptical of their safety and refuse to vaccinate their children or themselves. This scepticism is fuelled by disinformation, fabricated research, and misinformed opinion sold as facts. As trust declines in institutions like the government, people do not know where to turn for factual information. Declining vaccination rates have consequences, however, including rising numbers of cases of diseases like measles, that were disappearing.
Our research suggests that these trends are driven by a confluence of at least four factors, including cognitive biases (the ways we process information), changes in the information system (e.g., the rise of social media, the diversification of media outlets, the role of filters and algorithms), increasing demands on the education system that challenge the ability of schools to provide students and adults with the skills they need to navigate this more complex information system, and polarisation — political, economic, and demographic divisions within society.
RAND is concerned about the phenomenon because of its consequences for American democracy and democracies elsewhere, including in Europe. Without a common set of shared facts and objective benchmarks, policymakers struggle to debate policy options and reach compromise on key policy issues. Furthermore, a failure to attend to objective data has contributed to some of the United States’ greatest policy failures — the Great Depression, for example, was made worse by a failure to attend to macroeconomic fundamentals.
Before we can move to solutions and responses, however, we need to look back, to understand the historical roots of the phenomenon. Our research on US historical experience suggests that while Truth Decay is new in some ways, it also has historical analogues — the 1890s, the 1920s-1930s, and the late 1960s-1970s. In each of these periods we see significant and rapid changes in the way information is disseminated and consumed, leading to a blurring of the line between fact and opinion and a surge in the dissemination and spread of false and misleading information. Yellow Journalism in the 1890s, for example, and the spread of radio journalism in the 1920s and 1930s are both instances when new technologies empowered those seeking to spread exaggerated and misleading information or to promote their own ideologies and beliefs, often at the expense of fact. What we see today is similar in many ways, but occurs on a larger scale — the changes that have occurred in the scale and scope of information flow in the past 15 years are phenomenal. In addition, we see declining trust in key institutions like the government and the media in each of these three periods (but especially the 1960s-1970s). Polarisation is also relevant in our historical analogues. In the 1960s-1970s, that polarisation was political and social, with many competing ideas about the future of the country should look like. In the 1920s-1930s, economic inequality was the great axis of polarisation. Once again though, the polarisation that we observe today has been supercharged. Now, polarisation along political, economic, and social lines reinforce each other, making it a more powerful dividing force. What we do not see in our historical analogues, however, is the increasing disagreement in objective facts and data — this may be the defining characteristic of today’s manifestation of Truth Decay.
While these three examples come from American history, it is likely that there are comparable analogues in European history as well. Because historical examples can provide insights to guide our response to today’s Truth Decay, in Europe and the United States, mining these examples for lessons should be a focus of future research.
What can we do in the near term to address the challenges posed by Truth Decay, disinformation, and declining trust in key institutions? Because of the complexity of the challenge, many solutions will be required. However, central among these will need to be a change in the way information is disseminated and shared. Investigative journalism has played a significant role in each of the prior periods in bringing Truth Decay-like phenomena to an end, and so it is likely to be important now. However, we need alternative models for the news industry that support investigative journalism in a more sustainable way. One option would be to incentivise the development of philanthropically-funded news organisations, like ProPublica in the United States, which have the sole mission of pursuing high quality investigative journalism. Without profit as a driving force, such a model may be able to encourage an increase in both the quality and quantity of investigative journalism available for news consumers.
A second key step would be to require transparency about funding sources for news content and advertising. Social media companies are already taking steps to prevent foreign-funded political advertising, and to provide information on funding for all political content on their platforms. However, it is not clear that this goes far enough. Transparency about the funders behind all advertising and news content (where it is not obvious) should be a requirement not only on social media platforms, but also digital, print, and television outlets. Disinformation does not only operate in the political sphere and may have serious implications on issues including health and climate change. Transparency about funding sources can provide consumers with more information and the ability to understand and interpret bias.
These are just two of many possible ways to improve how information is provided. Just as important, however, there will also need to be changes in the way that citizens are equipped with the competencies and tools to distinguish fact from opinion, sound information from misleading information, reliable sources from lower-quality sources. At RAND, we’re committed to identifying the best strategy on both sides of this challenge.
