Misinformation And The Epistemic Integrity Of Democracy

Democracy relies on a shared body of knowledge among citizens, for example trust in elections and reliable knowledge to inform policy-relevant debate. We review the evidence for widespread disinformation campaigns that are undermining this shared knowledge. We establish a common pattern by which science and scientists are discredited and how the most recent frontier in those attacks involves researchers in misinformation itself. We list several ways in which psychology can contribute to countermeasures. Keywords: Attacks on scientists; Climate science; Integrity of democracy; Misinformation. Copyright © 2023 The Authors.

Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved. Declaration of competing interest SL, JR, and SvdL have received funding from Google Jigsaw for empirical work on inoculation against misinformation and continue to collaborate with Jigsaw. The remaining authors declare no competing interests. Ullrich Ecker is a professor at the School of Psychological Science and a fellow at the Public Policy Institute, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. Jon Roozenbeek is assistant professor in psychology and security at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK.

Sander van der Linden is a professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge, UK. Li Qian Tay is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Medicine and Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. John Cook is a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne, Australia. “Epistemic” is a good five-dollar word. It means, roughly, “of or relating to knowledge or knowing.” Or “relating to knowledge or the study of knowledge.” (Think epistemology, fellow liberal-arts graduates.) The first time I remember encountering it in mainstream usage was during the early days of the Obama administration, when some of the internal intellectual bonds within the Republican Party were beginning to fracture.

For those conservatives skeptical of the growing Tea Party/talk radio/Fox News wing of the party, a key phrase was “epistemic closure” — the idea that some of their fellow partisans had shut themselves off... From The New York Times in 2010: Conservative media, Mr. Sanchez wrote at juliansanchez.com — referring to outlets like Fox News and National Review and to talk-show stars like Rush Limbaugh, Mark R. Levin and Glenn Beck — have “become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.” (Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)

As a result, he complained, many conservatives have developed a distorted sense of priorities and a tendency to engage in fantasy, like the belief that President Obama was not born in the United States... Soon conservatives across the board jumped into the debate. Jim Manzi, a contributing editor at National Review, wrote that Mr. Levin’s best seller, “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto” (Threshold Editions) was “awful,” and called the section on global warming a case for “willful ignorance,” and “an almost perfect example of epistemic closure.” Megan... Public Education Forum a NAFO Initiative Democracy is built on a foundation of shared facts and informed decision-making.

However, in recent years, trust in democratic institutions, journalism, and even science has eroded, giving rise to a phenomenon known as epistemic distrust—a deep skepticism toward information sources that once served as pillars of... When citizens no longer trust the institutions responsible for delivering truth, democracy itself is at risk. This article explores the causes and consequences of epistemic distrust and how it is exploited by misinformation, while offering practical steps to rebuild trust in democratic institutions.

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