Pro Truth

This is an important, timely and practical book about how to reverse the trend towards post-truth politics, fake news and viral deception. Its starting point is the Pro-Truth Pledge (www.protruthpledge.com)) which sets out 12 principles for sharing, honouring and encouraging truth in public life. With backgrounds in behavioural science and communication, the authors define and dissect many cognitive and emotional syndromes that exist within all of us, at least to some extent. These include various forms of cognitive bias and mental errors such as bias blind spot, confirmation bias, false consensus effect, illusory truth effect, single cause fallacy and backfire effect, where people simply defend their positions more vigorously when attacked. Then there are 10 forms of lies, including confabulation, deceptive hyperbole, 'glittering generality' and wilful ignorance, besides straightforward blatant lies. Finally, there is an extensive glossary with terms such as 'filter bubble' created by newsfeeds on social media and 'tribal epistemology' whereby we believe only our own side.

It will come as no surprise to the reader that the main case study here is Donald Trump, along with parallels involving, for instance, Putin and Brexit. Almost all politicians will apologise and recant if caught out by fact checking from mainstream media. Not Trump – he never retracts anything, and simply attacks the messenger or mainstream press, portraying himself as a victim of a witch hunt and maintaining that the press cannot be trusted. Interestingly, these tactics are correlated with a decline among Republicans of trust in mainstream media, even when its facts are manifestly correct. It turns out that if something is repeated often enough (this applied to the US government claiming that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11), people come to believe it. There is extensive coverage of role of online and social media, including an analysis of people's shifting adherence to genuine and fake news during the US 2016 election. We are all prone to manipulation unless we remain highly informed and constantly vigilant.

This whole process undermines trust and democracy, hence the proposal and adoption of the Pro-Truth Pledge, which has already been signed by a significant number of public figures, and will hopefully feature more prominently in the upcoming election. What the authors call 'rational communication' contains a lot of sound advice on how to engage constructively with those of a different persuasion by prioritising empathy over information and therefore engaging the psychological reality of the other. In this sense, collaborative truth-seeking is more strategic than debate and winning. Coming back to Trump, winning is for him the bottom line and any means is permissible. We can all learn how better to prioritise truth from the clear explanations and examples of this highly informative study by becoming more vigilant in our own analyses and interactions.