Knowledge Resistance in High-Choice Information Environments

Jesper Strömbäck, Åsa Wikforss, Kathrin Glüer, Torun Lindholm, Henrik Oscarsson, Jesper Strömbäck, Åsa Wikforss, Kathrin Glüer, Torun Lindholm, Henrik Oscarsson

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000599169
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Categoria: Kommunikationswissenschaften

This book offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of our patterns of engagement with politics, news, and information in current high-choice information environments. Putting forth the notion that high-choice information environments may contribute to increasing misperceptions and knowledge resistance rather than greater public knowledge, the book offers insights into the processes that influence the supply of misinformation and factors influencing how and why people expose themselves to and process information that may support or contradict their beliefs and attitudes.

A team of authors from across a range of disciplines address the phenomena of knowledge resistance and its causes and consequences at the macro- as well as the micro-level. The chapters take a philosophical look at the notion of knowledge resistance, before moving on to discuss issues such as misinformation and fake news, psychological mechanisms such as motivated reasoning in processes of selective exposure and attention, how people respond to evidence and fact-checking, the role of political partisanship, political polarization over factual beliefs, and how knowledge resistance might be counteracted.

This book will have a broad appeal to scholars and students interested in knowledge resistance, primarily within philosophy, psychology, media and communication, and political science, as well as journalists and policymakers.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1IntroductionToward Understanding Knowledge Resistance in High-Choice Information Environments

Jesper Strömbäck, Åsa Wikforss, Kathrin Glüer, Torun Lindholm and Henrik Oscarsson

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003111474-1

Introduction

While the usage of lies, distortions, and misrepresentations of facts for political purposes is nothing new, these phenomena have taken on increasing urgency over the last few years. The best example is probably the 2020 US presidential election, where Trump and his followers continue to claim that the election was stolen and that he rightfully had won. Both he and his followers, now including large parts of the Republican party, seem completely undeterred by the facts that Joe Biden won the electoral college votes with 306–232, that he won the popular vote with 6 million votes, that governmental experts who oversaw the election found that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, 2020), and that the dubious legal challenges that were filed were thrown out by the courts.

These attempts to overturn the election results were unprecedented in the US history. Never before has an American president refused to accept the election results and failed to congratulate the winner. On the other hand, never before has an American president spread as many lies, falsehoods, and misleading claims during his tenure (Kessler et al., 2020).

At the same time, numerous opinion polls – both immediately after the election and afterwards – have shown that Trump's repeated lies that the election was rigged and that he had won were successful in the sense that many believed and continue to believe him. For example, one opinion poll conducted two weeks after the election showed that a majority of Republicans thought that Trump “rightfully won”. Overall, only 55% said that they believed that the election had been “legitimate and accurate”, while 28% thought that the outcome was “the result of illegal voting or election rigging” (Kahn, 2020).

When traditional news media reported that Biden had won and Trump had lost, many directed their anger at the news media and sought refuge with political alternative right-wing media. Interestingly, before the election, Fox News was the most trusted and most used media among Republicans (Jurkowitz et al., 2020), but when Fox News stuck with the truth, many flocked to other right-wing media instead (Smith, 2020). Worth noting is that the claims from Trump and his allies and the conspiratorial belief among Republicans that the election was rigged only pertained to the presidential election, not to the House and Senate elections that took place at the same time, and where Republicans were more successful.

While this might be an exceptional case, it illustrates several interrelated problems increasingly facing contemporary liberal democracies across the world. Among these are the prevalence of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories; the complex role of news media, social media, and partisan-oriented media in processes of dealing with but also being the sources of and amplifying misinformation and disinformation; biased processing of information; factual belief polarization; the prevalence of misperceptions and belief in conspiracy theories; and ultimately knowledge resistance.

In this chapter, we will discuss each of these, and thereby set the stage for subsequent chapters. First, we will, however, discuss why knowledge resistance is a major problem that needs much more scholarly and societal attention than hitherto.

The Problem With Knowledge Resistance

Although the concept of knowledge resistance will be analyzed in greater depth and defined in Chapter 2, it might be useful to shortly discuss it at the outset. Broadly speaking, knowledge resistance can be defined as the tendency to resist available evidence, and more specifically empirical evidence. Empirical evidence, of course, can come in many forms, but what is important is that empirical evidence pertains to how something actually is. In a narrow sense, knowledge resistance thus involves a form av irrational response to empirical evidence that is available to the individual. One key mechanism is motivated reasoning, where people – consciously but more often unconsciously – assess factual information not based on the empirical evidence and its truth value but rather to reach some other goals such as protecting one's social identity (Kahan, 2016a, 2016b; Kunda, 1990). One example might be someone who resists scientific evidence that human activities are the main cause of global warming because such evidence conflicts with the political or social group that s/he identifies with.

If knowledge resistance in the narrow sense pertains to resistance toward evidence that is available to the individual, in a broader sense, it also pertains to cases where the subject's reaction to the evidence is rational, given her prior beliefs, but where these prior beliefs in turn were acquired in an irrational way, perhaps as a result of misplaced trust. For instance, as a result of trusting hyper partisan media, a person might acquire a conspiracy belief that makes her disbelieve the evidence that the 2020 election was fair. Another case is irrational avoidance or seeking out of information sources, where people selectively expose themselves to information and information sources that can be expected to confirm their attitudes and beliefs or avoid information and information sources that can be expected to challenge them. An example might be people that attend to scientific studies based on whether they can be expected to confirm or challenge their attitudes and beliefs, not based on the trustworthiness of the sources. In other words, knowledge resistance in the wider sense involves resisting evidence that one easily could have but chose to avoid.

The problem with knowledge resistance is that it may lead to dire consequences at the individual as well as at the societal level, and that it poses a threat to democracy as such. Simply put, at all levels of analysis, knowledge is a fundamental prerequisite for individuals and groups if they are to be able to reach the desired ends. For example, if individuals want to stay healthy, they need to know what food to eat, what drinks to drink, and what precautions to take. Similarly, at the societal level, those with political and administrative power need to know, for example, which health-promoting policies work better than others and how to combat, for example, illness and communicable diseases. Resistance to knowledge might thus have disastrous consequences. For example, skepticism about and refusal to take vaccines has recently led to a resurgence of preventable diseases such as measles, rubella, mumps, and whooping cough (Kubin, 2019; Papachristanthou & Davis, 2019). One of the main reasons behind this skepticism and refusal is fear of adverse side effects, sometimes bolstered by conspiracy theories, for example, that vaccines may cause autism (Yaqub et al., 2014). Research shows that such fears are unfounded (Taylor et al., 2014), but still, many persist in their belief in adverse effects of vaccines. In the US, the result is that about 42,000 adults and 300 children are estimated to die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases (ODPHP, 2020). Similarly, research shows that skepticism toward established knowledge about HIV/AIDS is associated with lower condom use, which, in turn, increases the risk that people will be infected (Bogart et al., 2011; see also Ucinski, 2019). The effects of knowledge resistance might also be global. One example is how resistance toward established scientific knowledge about climate change has led important actors, such as the US under the Trump presidency, to weaken regulations aimed at reducing air pollution and emissions (Popovich et al., 2020). Public opinion surveys also show that a sizeable minority does not accept established knowledge that human activities are the main cause of global warming (Krosnick & MacInnis, 2020). In most countries, such skepticism toward scientifically established knowledge is more widespread among right-leaning citizens, reflecting an ideological divide (Funk & Kennedy, 2016; McCright et al., 2016; Oscarsson et al., 2021). As climate change severely affects the social and environmental determinants of health, it has been estimated to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths every year between 2030 and 2050 (WHO, 2018).

In essence, then, knowledge resistance has profound effects on the individual as well as the societal level of analysis, preventing us all from reaching our desired ends. Important in that context is that no one is immune against the psychological processes that contribute to knowledge resistance. At the same time, no-one can fully escapte reality. As succinctly noted by O'Connor and Weatherall (2019, p. 6), “If you believe in false things about the world, and you make decisions on the basis of those beliefs, then those decisions are unlikely to yield the outcome you expect and desire. The world pushes back”.

Knowledge resistance also poses grave challenges for the functioning of democracy. Although scholars might argue about exactly how informed citizens need to be (Dahl, 1998; Lupia, 2016; Popkin, 1994), for democracy to function well, citizens need to be at least reasonable informed about politics and society (Dahl, 1998; DelliCarpini & Keeter, 1996; Hochschild & Einstein, 2015; Rosenfeld, 2019; Wikforss, 2021). Otherwise, they will not be able to evaluate public policy, hold those in power accountable, or cast informed votes. Their voting behavior will also not reflect their actual preferences. Furthermore, since politicians respond to public opinion, as expressed in polls and elections, misinformed citizens might create incentives for politicians to cater to their misperceptions rather than correct them, and in such a process, politicians might willingly or unwillingly help to reinforce misperceptions. Numerous studies also show that misperceptions influence citizens’ political attitudes and behavior. Among other things, research shows that overestimations of the size of the immigrant population are associated with anti-immigration attitudes (Gorodzeisky & Semyonov, 2020; Meltzer & Schemer, 2021), that misperceptions related to welfare spending are associated with support for welfare policies (Kuklinski et al., 2000), and that beliefs in false rumors about presidential candidates can affect voting behavior (Weeks & Garrett, 2014).

Knowledge resistance also undermines democratic processes by corrupting political discussions. For political discussions to be meaningful, not only do they need to be based on facts (DelliCarpini & Keeter, 1996; Hochschild & Einstein, 2015; McIntyre, 2018). There also needs to be a common set of true factual beliefs and – if there are factual disagreements – some generally accepted means of settling such disagreements (cf. Kavanagh & Rich, 2018; McIntyre, 2018). Simply put, the gulf between factual beliefs must not be too great. If or when politicians or others trade in misinformation or disregard established knowledge such as scientific evidence or official statistics, it becomes much more difficult to solve various disagreements between sides in a political conflict, increase knowledge and understanding, reach mutually acceptable decisions, and move the discussions forward (cf. Gutmann & Thompson, 1996; Kavanagh & Rich, 2018; Klintman, 2019; Miln...