The Thing We Value More Than Truth
In 2017, James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose underwent a project intended to test the strength of the peer review process in an area of academia known they referred to as “Grievance Studies”. The areas of interest that fall under the Grievance Studies umbrella include: cultural, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies, all concentrated in the Humanities. The three authors research and wrote a series of hoax papers that they submitted for publication to a number of leading journals in the space. Before news of the project broke, four of the papers had been published, and an additional three had been accepted for publication.
The Grievance Studies affair provided evidence for some weaknesses in the peer review process within Grievance Studies. In particular, the project demonstrated that even a hoax paper written by fictional authors can still be published as long as the tone of the paper conforms to the prevailing ideology of that discipline. It also catalyzed discussions about how even in academia, where peer review is intended as a safeguard for the veracity and quality of publications, truth has taken a back seat to reputation.
Truth has a puzzling relationship with society today. Thanks to the Internet, it has never been easier to both seek out truth through new information, and also lie to people by taking advantage of how irrational our brains are. However, it is clear we still hold truth in high regard: we still universally despise those seen as liars, and the term “fake news” has emerged in recent years as an insult meant to undermine various media organizations.
Despite the assertion that truth is valued, the state of public discourse would lead you to believe that people don’t value truth as much as they think they do. Media headlines are designed so that people will accept them at face value without reading into the story and asking questions. Social media is littered with viral videos and memes about political issues designed specifically to manipulate your emotions and garner their desired response. There’s so much information flying around that it’s hard to keep up with what’s fact and what’s fiction. What’s more, we’re unlikely to go digging for the truth as long as the information lines up with our beliefs. We take the headline’s word for it.
The unique situation afforded by digital media has very rapidly altered how we interact and present ourselves (and our opinions) to one another. Discussions of complex issues are dominated by rhetoric. Taboo topics such as gender, religion, or race need to be handled with kid gloves; one misplaced tweet or comment can now ruin your reputation, career, or your entire life. Daring to question the narrative will more often than not result in a social media witch hunt. In a very short amount of time, the state of public discourse has morphed into a place where truth is present only if it’s convenient for the narrative.
Truth, despite the value our society places in it, has taken a back seat to something we value even more: our reputation. This value system places intentions over outcomes, and appearance over accountability. But it’s not new: we’ve always been prone to curating a particular view of ourselves.
For millennia, there have been numerous examples that illustrate how fearful many cultures were of shame. For example, Samurai in feudal Japan would rather die with honor (performed through a ritual known as seppuku) than return to their village in a state of shame. This sociological phenomena — known as impression management — was first analyzed in 1956 by Erving Goffman. As Goffman outlined in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, we put on a “performance” during social interactions akin to acting in a play.
Impression management theory dictates that each social interaction has a front region — where the performance happens — and a back region — where we prepare for our performance. Each actor in the performance performs a “line”, which is a pattern of verbal and non-verbal acts, as they seek to conform to the role they have chosen for themselves in the performance.
Social media has only amplified the reach of this phenomena. We now have multiple stages on which we can perform: one physical and one digital. The digital stage that people perform on via social media provides an additional layer to obscure truth. The “line” of this digital performance is often driven by another agent of morality: virtue-signalling.
Popularized by the British journalist James Bartholomew in 2015, the term virtue-signalling has a few applications, but it’s most commonly used today as a pejorative by the political right towards the political left. Virtue-signalling is — to lazily borrow from Wikipedia — The conspicuous expression of moral values done primarily with the intent of increasing standing within a social group. In other words, it’s advertising your moral values so you gain social brownie points from your audience.
For example, if I share an article about racial injustice on Facebook that indicates my concern, despite the fact that I’ve never actually done anything that would assist in improving racial inequality, that would be me signalling that I value equality. It’s ultimately an empty gesture designed to make me look morally superior to others not actively signalling the same view. Because of how easy it is to signal due to the reach of social media, the behaviour has become mainstream.
Some evolutionary psychologists posit that virtue-signalling has an underlying evolutionary basis, describing it as a fitness display stemming from signalling theory. In the case of humans, it can be seen as low investment way for an individual to increase their social capital. This view also helps explain why conservatives use the term as a pejorative.
Conservatives typically place more value on industriousness and competition than Liberals, and signalling theory is a competition-based framework. Virtue-signalling is ultimately a low investment (lazy) way of increasing social capital and one’s standing in society, so Conservatives typically reject it as a viable social or political strategy.
Not all virtue-signalling is bad; it’s a fundamental way that we communicate our values to others. The products we consume and the activities we engage in all signal our virtues to others: do you drink your coffee at Starbucks or at McDonald’s? Do you buy groceries at Whole Foods or Wal-Mart? Do you prefer hip-hop or indie rock? Do you share articles from BuzzFeed or Bloomberg? Do you buy your clothes from Urban Outfitters or the Gap? Do you drive a Ford F-150 or a Toyota Camry?
All of these choices provide others with small clues about who you are as a person and to which group(s) you belong. We have an incredible amount of choices today, making it quite difficult for all individuals within a group to agree upon everything.
Unfortunately, when we treat everyone in large groups (like political affiliations) as the same, we forget about the idiosyncrasies present within groups and instead focus all of our attention on the differences between groups. This is due a psychological phenomenon called the in-group/out-group bias.
Essentially, we view those within our group as diverse individuals and those outside our group as an undifferentiated collective. For example, not all Liberals may believe in climate change, support abortion rights, or vote in favour of tax cuts for the middle class. Similarly, not all conservatives may support gun ownership, attend church, or reject same-sex marriage. But the two sides almost always produce an out-group stereotype of the other.
Because of how prevalent virtue-signalling is in our society and the role it plays in how we sort people into homogeneous groups, it becomes almost impossible to sort through the noise and understand just how different people can be at an individual level. It’s far easier to divide people into two groups, join the mob you view as morally superior, and attack the other side without mercy.
In The Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon asserts that people enjoy inflicting wrongdoing on others, but dislike being on the receiving end of such actions. When comparing experiences between both sides of the interaction, it becomes clear that the benefits of being an aggressor are outweighed by the suffering experienced as a victim. To prevent this scenario from playing out, individuals in a society unite under a set of agreements known as justice.
Despite being the default condition in our society, justice is not the most desirable state for the individual. If given the option to skirt the rules of society and be allowed to inflict pain and suffering on others without it being broadcast, individuals would jump at the opportunity. Glaucon proposes a thought experiment to Socrates where the mythical ring of Gyges is provided to a man. The ring turns the wearer invisible. As Glaucon elaborates:
“Now, no one, it seems, would be so incorruptible that he would stay on the path of justice or stay away from other people’s property, when he could take whatever he wanted from the marketplace with impunity, go into people’s houses and have sex with anyone he wanted, kill or release anyone from prison he wished, and do all the other things that make him feel like a god among humans. Rather his actions would be in no way different from those of an unjust person, and both would follow the same path.”
In other words, people are only virtuous because they’re afraid of getting caught. Glaucon’s thought experiment uncovered a resounding conclusion: the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure everyone’s reputation is constantly on the line. This seems strange: shouldn’t we act just and good regardless of whom our audience is? This rationalist point of view is certainly correct when we’re dealing with the physical world. We make observations, test hypotheses, and gradually converge on the truth. However, this perspective ignores the influence of the social world and its influence on personal accountability.
Phil Tetlock’s research on accountability has uncovered unique insights about how accountable we are to telling the truth. Tetlock makes key distinctions between the physical world (driven by even-keeled exploratory thought) and the social world (driven by biased confirmatory thought). Tetlock found that accountability increases exploratory thought only when 3 conditions are met:
i. Decision-makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience
ii. The audience’s views are unknown
iii. They believe the audience is well-informed and interested in accuracy
In other words, when all of these conditions are met, people will take an objective stance and use an empirical approach to figure out the truth as it reflects reality. In this scenario, truth is what the audience wants to see. However, this hypothetical scenario is incredibly rare, so the social world is almost always the dominant influence on our social behaviour; our reputation-driven society is in fact Glauconian.
Moral reasoning likely evolved to help us pursue socially strategic goals like guarding our reputation or convincing people to support us. Tetlock uses the metaphor that, in the social world, we all act as little politicians. No wonder every discussion seems to get political.
If we apply Tetlock’s conditions to the current state of public discourse, it becomes quite clear that these three conditions are not applicable. Truth is rarely the desired output. As a result, our default condition is that people will work harder to look right than to be right.
The relationship between virtue-signalling and our Glauconian society has created a major problem. Due to how easy it has become to signal (virtue or otherwise), confirmatory thoughts and actions have become more amplified than ever, diminishing the abundance of exploratory thoughts and actions. From a game theory point of view, we stand to gain more from virtue-signalling than seeking truth (especially if the truth runs counter to the view espoused by confirmatory thinkers). Predictably, we signal virtue more than we seek truth.
We are often unable to have constructive discourse online out of fear that stating the “wrong” opinion on social media will have dire consequences in the real world. Additionally, research shows that lies spread far faster through social media than truths, largely driven by their novelty and the emotions evoked by characteristics of stories or posts that are lies, such as sensationalist titles. The problem is further compounded by how little effort it takes to silence dissenting viewpoints; they’re only a block, unfollow, or worse of all, an unfriend away. Unfortunately, obscuring reality in the interest of keeping up appearances is unsustainable as a discourse strategy. Eventually, reality will catch up, and it can have dire consequences.
One prominent example is the infamous Pizzagate conspiracy theory about a pedophilia ring being run out of Comet Ping Pong, a prominent pizza parlour in Washington D.C. The entire story was a hoax, but that didn’t stop one outraged individual from showing up to Comet and firing 3 rounds from a semi-automatic rifle inside the building. Thankfully no one was injured. What could cause someone to turn so violent?
In his landmark work The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker highlights that societies which allow an open and free exchange of ideas are far less violent than those who do not. By discouraging open debate and the free exchange of ideas, we are reversing progress made in the past 100 years that has contributed to the lowest levels of violence in human history. Political narratives have become tools to mobilize people for potentially violent means. Look no further than the recent swath of protests on North American college campuses to see a manifestation of this reversal in the trend. Yet again, the desire for a positive reputation takes precedent over truth.
Our commitment to maintaining our reputation has contributed to a polarization of beliefs in society. It is taboo to fraternize with the enemy, despite the nuance present within the views of both sides. In our current cultural climate, our approach to assessing most issues is predominantly binary. Every value not held by group A must then automatically be held by group B. Everything not Liberal must be Conservative. Everything not regressive left must be alt-right.
It is a convenient, overly simplistic way of dividing up and categorizing our world, and it impedes the chance to progress and find common ground. It’s clear that something needs to change. There are meaningful and productive discussions to be had on issues like income inequality, sexism, racism, and poverty that far too often get shut down because someone’s reputation was negatively impacted. Sometimes these issues have uncomfortable truths that need to be met head on and discussed; it is counterproductive to tiptoe around the issue simply because it makes us look better.
In order to improve public discourse, we need to win two separate battles. The first is internal: we’re fighting against emotional, irrational thinking that all of us are prone to. Additionally, research on content virality has demonstrated that emotions — with anger being the most impactful — are the underlying cause of what makes content spread. In other words, during our social media travels we’re more likely to see things that outrage us and make us act irrationally. That’s a formidable opponent in the fight to improve public discourse.
The second battle is external. We’re fighting against potential harm to our reputation. People are more cruel online — for a variety of reasons — and it’s risky to swim against the current. We also risk being wrong, which we incorrectly conflate with being stupid. Intelligence and education (or wokeness depending on the topic) is highly valued in our current society, so being seen as stupid is a huge blow to one’s reputation.
It remains unclear what the state of public discourse will be in the coming years. Movements such as the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) have started to disrupt the current political climate. The IDW’s response to identity politics is similar to the scientific community’s response to hot button issues like vaccines, GMOs, or climate change. Both share the similarity that truth and understanding is the goal, but the difference is that issues discussed by the IDW live primarily in the social sciences, not the sciences, making it far more difficult to extract concrete conclusions from the current literature on the topic. While the case for vaccines, GMOs, or climate change is clear thanks to the available empirical evidence, it is far more difficult to make arguments that counter the current narrative surrounding identity politics.
One thing is certain: a move towards discussing ideas openly and constructively so that we can approach the truth is valuable to our society. Regardless of how we want to present the world, ignoring reality is a recipe for disaster in the long-term. When put our reputation above the well-being of others, nothing good can come of it. As Bari Weiss stated in her profile of the IDW:
“I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.”
