It’s not just about fake news — our hunger for control and community makes us surprisingly eager to embrace comfortable lies over difficult truths.
In a world drowning in misinformation, we keep pointing fingers at those who create and spread false narratives. But what if the real story isn’t about them — it’s about us?
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast with professor Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, author of Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation, we discover a surprising truth: Humans are naturally drawn to misinformation.
It’s not just about believing what we want to believe — it’s about satisfying our fundamental needs for what Young calls “comprehension, control, and community,” even if that means embracing falsehoods.
Young explains how our political identities have become so intertwined with our basic human desires that we often prefer comforting lies to uncomfortable truths.
But perhaps most provocatively, Young suggests that our modern media landscape and political environment haven’t created these vulnerabilities — they’ve simply become extraordinarily adept at exploiting them. The algorithms know exactly which buttons to push, and it makes us surprisingly willing targets.
While this might sound hopeless, Young argues that we might reclaim our agency — but only if we’re willing to face some painful truths about ourselves first.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. As we navigate the turbulent waters of another presidential election cycle, the power of misinformation looms larger than ever. From the big lie about the 2020 election to conspiracy theories that fueled the January 6th insurrection, we’ve witnessed how false narratives can shake the very foundation of our democracy.
The right-wing media ecosystem has become particularly adept at creating alternate realities where facts become malleable and truth seems optional.
The emergence of Trump and his style of politics has not just normalized misinformation, it has weaponized it. But while we often focus on those who create and distribute false information, we rarely ask a more fundamental question. Why do millions of Americans actively choose to believe things that they know are not true? What drives otherwise rational people to embrace demonstrably false narratives about election fraud, COVID, or climate change? How has our political identity, particularly on the right, become so fundamentally intertwined with rejecting established facts?
My guest, Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, is a professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Delaware. Her TED talk on the psychology of political behavior has garnered over 2 million views, and in her provocative new book, Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation, she explores how basic human needs for comprehension, control, and community make us susceptible to believing false information when it aligns with our political identity.
Her analysis couldn’t be more timely as we face the daily line between fact and fiction, which is increasingly blurred by political actors and their media allies. It is my pleasure to welcome Professor Dannagal Goldthwaite Young here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Danna, thanks so much for joining us.
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young: Thanks, Jeff. It’s great to be on.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. One of the things that you talk about and that I alluded to in the introduction is that, while there’s so much talk about the purveyors of misinformation and all the stuff that’s put out there in social media and so many other places, we forget that there’s a demand side to this.
Dannagal: Yes, and this is an uncomfortable thing to deal with because we want to think about misinformation and disinformation. Disinformation is the stuff that is intentionally misleading, that is designed to deceive, and misinformation is that which just happens to be false and may be shared by a friend or family member who doesn’t know that it’s false. We want to believe that these things exist out in the world and are sort of the source of harm, but we want to also ignore the role that we may play in driving the engine that is responsible for the prevalence of all of this misinformation and of these lies.
Unfortunately, because we are social animals, and because we are flawed human beings, we actually are attracted to especially certain kinds of falsehoods that satisfy certain fundamental needs that we have, that drive us every day. And because of this, we actually are attracted to misinformation.
Before I get into the three Cs that you mentioned [comprehension, control, and community], I’ll say life is very hard. Life is often filled with things that are painful or challenging. Life sometimes makes us feel like we have no power and we have no agency. Sometimes life is confusing and we’re faced with things that seem completely outside of the realm of explanation. Sometimes life is very lonely and we feel maybe a bit abandoned.
All of these things are part of the experience of what it is to be a human being, and if misinformation or disinformation can even just for a moment remedy some of those sources of pain and discomfort, then those falsehoods will be especially attractive.
When we talk about the three Cs, that is our needs for comprehension, control, and community. The reason I speak in these terms is that people generally want to think that they are motivated to have an accurate understanding of the world, but that is simply not the case.
It is fair to say that under certain circumstances, maybe with adequate motivation and incentives, perhaps then, we are motivated to be accurate in what we perceive. But by and large, most of the time, that is not our main motivation. Most of the time, we are motivated by these three things that really have helped us historically, evolutionarily survive.
One is feeling like we comprehend what’s going on. A sense that we get it is required to take some kind of action, any kind of action. If you feel confused, you do not know what kind of action to take. We want to feel like we comprehend what’s happening, especially in terms of elements like cause and effect.
Next up is we want to feel that we have some power or control over our world. That’s very natural. We want to feel like we have some agency. We don’t want to feel like we’re simply being acted upon all the time and that we don’t have any say about how the world is going to work around us. Obviously, that too, is associated with, just sort of historically, if you feel like you have agency, you feel like you have some control that allows you to take action, that allows you to feel confident that you can take the steps necessary to perhaps reach a certain goal.
The final one is the most important, and that is our need for community. I often say people hear the expression “We are social animals” like humans are social animals. I used to think that that was just something that my teachers would say to my parents about me. Like, “Oh, Danna is a social animal,” meaning I talk too much in class, but really, no, we all are. We all are social animals. We cannot survive alone and that is simply because, if left to our own devices, we can’t capitalize on the wonderful talents and gifts and skills of the other people in our orbit who might be able to fill in some of the blanks that we can’t fill in.
If it’s tens of thousands of years ago and we’re in a jungle somewhere, and I don’t know how to fish, but I do know how to make a fire, well, I want to become pretty close with a person who does know how to fish, but maybe doesn’t know how to make a fire. Those kinds of relationships, especially in a group context, will aid in survival. We survive in groups, and human beings cannot survive alone. Community is really central.
If we’re driven by these three Cs — our needs for comprehension, control, and community — and those are the ways that we come to understand the world, then our need for accuracy really does take a backseat. And if misinformation and falsehoods and lies can make us feel like we understand what’s going on and we have some kind of power and that we’re part of a group, then we’d rather be wrong than right.
Jeff: We would rather be reassured than right. That sense of the need for reassurance is what outweighs the need for accuracy, essentially.
Dannagal: Correct.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about how identity plays into this and how we see ourselves in the broader social-political context.
Dannagal: There’s a wonderful work from sociology and social psychology that came out 50 years ago or more: social identity theory. Henri Tajfel was trying to understand, in the aftermath of World War II, how it is that people behave in groups and why they behave that way. In particular, why is it that people will have a group identity that causes them to seemingly automatically judge out-group members as lesser than or as hostile?
Social identity theory suggests that we all have different identities, and I think of them as hats that we could wear, or perhaps better is different pairs of glasses that we can put on because they shape what we see. When we’re wearing these glasses of social identity, it’s just a difference in what we’re paying attention to and what’s motivating us. When I have activated my identity as somebody who is a college professor, that’s really going to shape how I think about the world, my role in it, how I talk. I’m going to want to perform my role as a good member of my team.
I want to be a good exemplar. I want to be a shining prototype of my team. And I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to think about whom do I know—” And not necessarily accurate actual people, but maybe even fictional combinations of the best traits that are exhibited by a college professor. Maybe it’s about how they dress, how they speak, how they act, how they talk, what their values are, how they spend their free time. And if I have that pair of glasses on, where I’m thinking of myself as a college professor, those things are going to shape everything from how I act and how I speak, even to what I see.
And so social identity, the reason that I talk about it so much in this book is that in politics in the United States, obviously there’s always been an awareness that we could put social identity into our models of understanding how people vote and how people behave politically. But for a very long time there was a piece missing, and that was that throughout the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, especially in the ’50s and ’60s, we still had political parties that were really mixed in terms of some of the more fundamental aspects of identity that people think of as social identity.
So, yes, we had Republicans, we had Democrats, but within each of those parties, there were people from a lot of different racial and ethnic groups. There were people from different religions who practiced different faiths and did not. There were people who lived in different parts of the country. There wasn’t a huge inter-correlation between all of these aspects of identity and political party identification.
But with the racial realignment of our political parties that happened after Jim Crow and after Black Americans migrated north and west to cities, there was really a push for the Democratic Party to become the party of civil rights.
And some of the things that happened as a result of that were that the Democratic Party became more racially and ethnically diverse, and the Republican Party became more internally homogenous along the lines of race, so with a greater proportion of white Americans.
And then as we head into the ’70s and ’80s, we also see that there’s a religious sorting happening as well, with the Republican Party becoming more devout Christian religious, and evangelical Christian in particular. The Democratic Party becomes more secular and more agnostic overall.
We also see trends in geography. The Democratic Party has more people who live in urban and suburban areas, and the Republican Party is comprised of more people who live in rural areas. Now, all of this means that our politics become correlated with all of these really primal aspects of social identity. So if you are Republican, now statistically, overwhelmingly, it is likely that you are white, culturally conservative, live in a rural area, and/or are evangelical Christian. And on the other side, if you’re a Democrat, it’s statistically more likely that you are a racial or ethnic minority. Perhaps you’re secular or agnostic and live in the suburbs or an urban area, and are culturally liberal.
And when these things hold together in a package like this, they become very easily activated. If you check a lot of boxes of your team, that means that you are really in tight alignment with that kind of political identity. You’re going to be readily activated; you’re going to react more emotionally to identity threat. You’re going to be more readily mobilized, especially by messages that activate your identity threat.
And so the case that I make in the book is that part of what’s happening with the story of social identity in the United States is that you have a Republican Party that, because of its internal homogeneity, ends up being really strongly emotionally activated through identity threat.
Jeff: Why is this so much worse now in terms of the amount of misinformation that is out there? Given that there is this evolutionary psychology that is at the core of this, one would think that these things would have been with us in at least an equal degree for a long time, but it seems to be far more prevalent now.
Dannagal: Part of that is because of this political and cultural shift that we have experienced. So obviously social identity has always been playing a role, always. But what I think is interesting in studying politics and media and culture is the interaction between these different features. And we have this political environment that has resulted in political parties that are quite distinct in these ways.
And we also, at the same time, have watched the evolution of a media environment that is hyper-fragmented, where there is no more giant mass audience, where it really is about finding these niche homogeneous little audiences that you can best target with advertisements to make money.
And those things work really well together. The political separation of different types of people and a media environment predicated on the separation of different types of people: It seems like a match made in heaven.
Jeff: In many ways, it has very much become like a religion.
Dannagal: It’s interesting because some of the way that we think about political identity— I would say about 20 years ago, when folks started thinking about some of these dynamics and political beliefs becoming an identity more than just a belief set, it really was based on this analogy of religion because it was clear that when people call themselves Catholic, it’s an identity. It represents a whole way of life and a series of customs — not just in church, but also largely outside of the church.
I have a lot of friends who grew up Catholic and they joke about Catholic guilt and things like that. There are aspects of that identity and those practices that are only tangentially related to the faith itself. And what I think is interesting is when people start talking about political identity, it’s that same kind of thing. You lead with the identity and maybe you pick and choose which of the issue positions you hold, but the identity is what it is.
Just like you might have folks who are Catholic who say, “Yes, I’m Catholic, but I consider myself pro-choice” — they do that a la carte thing where they’re like, “Oh, I identify as this thing, but I don’t follow all of the customs. I don’t follow all of the doctrine.” We’re witnessing folks who are orienting towards politics in that same kind of way. “I identify as a Democrat. No, I don’t have exactly the same issue positions on everything, but that’s just how I identify.”
Jeff: The other analogy to that, to take it a step further, is the degree to which information — sometimes, even though there’s this sense that it may not be accurate — that information or misinformation is based on faith.
Dannagal: Yes, and interestingly, also whether or not we choose to believe something or whether or not we perceive something as true. It’s funny that you actually say that, Jeff, because when people orient to truth through faith and intuition as opposed to needing empirical evidence and data, some of our work shows that [the first group] are statistically more likely to be wrong than [the second].
Which makes a lot of sense, because your intuition and your gut and what you have faith in, these are not things that are going to drive you to challenge your belief systems. These are not things that are going to invite you to update your beliefs in light of new information. Intuition, gut, and faith are going to tell you that whatever you’ve been thinking is the right way to think, and whatever you value is what should drive what is true.
Jeff: All of that is accelerated by the fact that a lot of threats are out there, legitimate threats, and a lot of threats are amped up by politicians, by demagogues, what have you — which immediately creates the need to find someone to blame and to find a set of values to hang onto.
Dannagal: Yes, I would agree. I think you also have to factor in how that sense of threat, particularly threat to one’s social identity, [becomes a] threat from the outgroup. If you are a liberal, the threat is from Republicans, these anti-democratic forces, conservative media. And if you are on the right, the threat is from liberal media and Democrats in the far left and/or maybe the threat of illegal immigrants or sexual minorities.
And whereas on the left, you might see evangelical Christians as a threat. You might also see folks operating way farther out there. You would say white Christian nationalists are a threat. These social identity-based threats are really wild to look at in terms of their communication dynamics — because when we respond to identity threat, if we experience some identity threat, first of all, our own social identity as a member of our own team is immediately activated. It’s immediately at the top of our minds.
For instance, nothing makes an Eagles fan more aware of their status as an Eagles fan than being in a game against the Dallas Cowboys. So, once you have that threat, then you’re like, “Oh, yes, I’m a fan of this team. This is my team.” That’s number one. And number two is that the presence of that social identity threat not only activates our group identity but immediately causes a feeling of arousal and anger aimed at the outgroup.
And notice a lot of outgroup threat it’s not necessarily about fear. Fear is an emotion that is a flight emotion, not a fight emotion. So, a lot of this outgroup threat is framed in messages in ways that are designed to elicit anger. Once we have that activated, we will take action. The outgroup threat is a huge mobilizer of action. So when I’m telling folks about how they might remedy some of these processes in their own lives, I often refer to that feeling, that rush of cortisol that you feel when you’re online, and your social identity threat is activated.
You see something, you feel that sense of moral outrage, and you may not even— You don’t even think. You just immediately might feel you’re going to like that thing or share it online, or share it with a family member, or share it with a friend, or share it with all your followers.
What if you just fight back against that urge? Because, number one, recognizing that anger is so readily exploitable can cause you to maybe take a breath and then think, “Who is trying to make me mad, and what do they have to gain from my anger?”
And usually, what they have to gain is you doing something. So, whether that is clicking, or liking, or sharing, I often frame this in terms of some of the affordances and incentives of social media. The social media algorithms really want you to react in these ways because without your active participation and engagement, they cannot collect all of those micro-level pieces of data that they need to target you with advertising.
So, there are reasons why this kind of outrage-oriented content is so prevalent online. It’s because these algorithms need our responses to be able to know who we are and what drives us, so then companies can better target us with ads to buy soda or whatever.
Jeff: Talk about why you think COVID, the lockdown, the pandemic made all of this so much worse.
Dannagal: Several mechanisms are at play. Number one, when we are under conditions of uncertainty, we are not excellent at thinking rationally and carefully. Conditions of uncertainty incentivize our psychophysiological systems to respond as quickly as possible in the interest of our own survival. We do not like uncertainty. What we want is certainty, predictability, and closure. And some of us want these things more than others.
So, under those situations of uncertainty, we’re going to tend to make decisions very quickly. We’re going to tend to jump to conclusions. We will tend to form judgements, maybe without all the requisite information that we need — so that is one piece of that puzzle. Another piece of the puzzle is that during COVID, we were all stuck at home, isolated from the social world. And even if we were stuck at home with a partner or kids, it still does not satisfy that same real social dimension of the human experience that we’re used to.
And a lot of folks filled that void by going online, which could do two things. One, that could render people more opportunities to be exposed to mis- and disinformation. That’s one. But number two, a lot of these folks were seeking that feeling of community and solidarity that maybe they used to get when they would go bowling and go to church or go to the bar or go out with friends, and we weren’t able to do that. So they would enter these spaces online where they might be able to develop some of those feelings and those needs.
That social need is quite reasonable. The problem is that we found that when folks would enter spaces online, a lot of times those spaces have been created by bad actors, like the Stop the Steal movement; or maybe they were created by people who had genuine curiosity, but those spaces then were taken over by like-minded people who simply share mis- and disinformation regularly.
But what ends up happening in those spaces is that they consistently activate a whole different social identity outside of, “Here I am as a member of my neighborhood,” outside of, “Oh, here I am, I’m a parent at my local school,” outside of, “Oh, here I am. I am a member of this congregation.” Instead, it’s, “I am a member of this group, and in this group, these are the things that we celebrate. This is the way we think. These are the behaviors we reward.”
And I think that interaction of uncertainty, a real ambiguous threat, a lack of information forthcoming from government (in part because we did not have adequate information from the Chinese government about the origins of COVID) — all that on top of our politically polarized world and declining trust in medicine, science, and other institutions — it really created this perfect storm for people to start to join communities that were themselves rooted in falsehoods that then became very tied to their identity.
Jeff: Given how atomized we’ve become, given the 24/7 media landscape we live in with social media and all the things that you’ve touched on, and given the way this has been taken advantage of at this point by leaders, how do you see a way to turn that clock back, to put the genie back in the proverbial bottle, even a little bit?
Dannagal: I don’t know that we can put the genie back in the bottle. I think that, well, to switch metaphors, that ship has sailed, that that genie has flown off on a carpet or something. We can’t turn back time, but what we can do is to reclaim agency at the individual level. Part of that is about changing why and how we engage with media. So, thinking about what kind of content and programming in the televisual environment is helpful to democracy or not?
And if it is content that’s about right versus left, left versus right, and simplifies things into this bifurcated world, is that kind of content really useful? Is it meaningful? Is it informative? As opposed to policy and issue-oriented content that gets us to move beyond this sort of right versus left, I don’t know, this oversimplified right versus left battle. That’s one piece of it.
I would say also, let me just say to be clear on that last point, when it comes to the role of Donald Trump and Make America Great Again elites really dismantling some of the norms and processes and institutions of democracy. I do think journalists have a need to call those things out, but it’s very, very crucial that journalists do not speak of Republican elites and Republican voters as one monolith because they’re very different. They have very different goals and they have very different reasons for what they’re doing and how they’re behaving.
While I don’t love the idea of right versus left and that oversimplification, journalists do have an obligation to report on what aspects of, for example, this new administration’s behaviors are and are not consistent with historical norms and the Constitution. Another aspect of our media behavior that could change the calculus a bit has to do with what I mentioned before about social media: We can choose whether or not we are going to reward outrage content. We can choose whether or not we are going to share or comment on stories that make us feel angry.
And my suggestion would be to just take a beat and walk away because without the added fuel of user engagement, those things wither and die on the vine and it quiets down.
The other piece is there’s evidence that when we enter these social media spaces, we feel a pressure to perform. We feel a pressure to perform in keeping with our political team. So perhaps that means we’re going to be a little more vocal in these spaces than we would in real life. We’re going to want to put our flag in the sand and say, “Look, here I am. I’m a good member of our team.”
There have been a lot of calls during the war in Gaza for folks to pick a side. Show your allegiance, which team are you on? And I would just say if folks are really thinking hard and looking at information about what is a very complex, historically complex situation, do you really want them weighing in quickly because you want them to prove they’re a good member of your team? Or perhaps would the appropriate call be, “You know what, inform yourself about what’s going on, read up on the history; and you know what, nuanced positions on this are okay.”
So this social pressure to be, you know, with us or against us is so great and I would urge folks to push back against that.
And one way of pushing back against that is by being vocal online about those instances in which you don’t really agree with your team. Your team is zigging, and you zag, and you’re like, “You know what? I know that this is going to put me on the outs with my team, but I’m going to be honest about where I stand here.” The reason that this is so imperative is that, because no one does this, it gives a false perception of the homogeneity of issue positions within one side and within the other side.
And that’s just not true. You look at the data on public opinion on abortion or guns. There is so much agreement when you look at really specific, nuanced issue positions on abortion and guns. Even these really controversial issues, there is a ton of agreement, but we don’t hear about that because I think a lot of folks get real nervous about giving voice online to anything that might step slightly outside of their team’s consensus.
If we become more comfortable throwing a wrench in the works a little bit and being like, “Look, here’s the truth. Here’s where I stand. I get it. I get why you all feel this way, but here’s why I hesitate on this one piece.” Those kinds of nuanced messages will necessarily complicate this false bifurcation that we have created over the last 10 years.
Jeff: Also, there’s a need to find — and sometimes this happens because of external circumstances — but to find a larger commonality. And I think back to immediately after 9/11 and the way people came together because there was a larger enemy, and a larger community formed from that. It dissipated very quickly, but it showed the power of that larger eventuality.
Dannagal: Yes, and there has been some work from some colleagues of mine in political science looking at ways of tapping into alternate social identities such that your status as a partisan becomes secondary to your status on some other team. And one example is that they’ve looked at maybe priming people’s status as an American. That’s goes along with that concept of country over party. So if you prime people’s sense that they’re American, their national identity, that can reduce some of these harmful effects of a really salient partisan identity. So that’s a good thing.
However, I get a little nervous about that because also if we’re living in a global context, do we want to replace a partisan identity with a national identity when sometimes nationalization has some negative repercussions as well?
What I’m interested in is going in the other direction — instead of going bigger, going smaller. When people think of themselves as members of their neighborhoods and their towns and their communities, that too immediately dissolves the power of the partisan identity because now people are interested in these shared goals of filling potholes and rebuilding the local library, and those do cut across party lines. And there is evidence that that can be really wonderful for reducing some of these outgroup hostilities that are associated with partisanship.
Jeff: And finally, just talk about the way these things feed on themselves because, once you get into these partisan cycles, the cycle essentially that we’re in now, it’s very hard to disengage from that.
Dannagal: Yes. Well, it’s hard as individuals to disengage from it because there’s a sense that, in order to be a good member of your team, you need to keep abreast of what’s going on. You need to keep your finger on the pulse, and you need to always be outraged.
And I’m seeing this online now in the wake of the November election. So let me go back a second and say part of what I think is really troubling about the dynamic that we’re in is the fact that it is self-reinforcing, that there are political and media elites who are deliberately activating our political identities through outgroup threat in order to render us more aroused, activated, able to be mobilized, et cetera.
And in so doing, they also model for us what it means to be a good member of our team — a lot of times in a way that’s especially extreme, like highlighting and celebrating extreme examples of our team membership. And as we do this, they’re also modeling what it means for good members of our team to comprehend the world, have control over it, and have community within it. So they’re illustrating for us, this is how people like us comprehend the world. This is how people like us control things. And this is how people like us enact and celebrate community.
And because especially of the ways that these political entities can take advantage of the really conveniently compatible media economics that we have — whether it’s social media or television media, journalism, partisan cable news — there is such a synergy because these political actors know that these activations of outgroup threat are the ones that are going to go viral online. They’re the ones that are going to make the news. They’re the ones that are going to attract the most attention. And so they’re incentivized to do that, and then all of these media organizations are incentivized to cover them.
What I think of as the great disruptor in all of this is us, people. Because all of these behaviors of political elites, of media, institutions, social media platforms, they are all based on predicting what we are going to do, how we are going to react, what’s going to move us, what’s going to make us mad, what’s going to make us buy things, what’s going to make us pay attention. And guess what? We do have agency.
And as a social scientist who studies patterns in human behavior, yes, the reality is humans are predictable. We do behave in ways where you can predict the probability of what people are going to do, but you cannot predict for sure what people are going to do because we have free will. And at any moment in time, we can push back against these incentive structures in meaningful ways that can really stop this recursive machinery from operating at all.
Jeff: Professor Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, her book is Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. Danna I thank you so much for spending time with us.
Dannagal: Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. This was fun.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on The WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
