If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past
week or so, you know that over the weekend America was introduced to the
concept of “alternative facts.” After Trump administration Press Secretary Sean
Spicer rebuked the media for accurately reporting the relatively small crowds
at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, senior White House aide Kellyanne
Conway told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Spicer wasn’t lying; he was simply
using “alternative facts.”
News outlets are still working through the process of
figuring out what to call these mischaracterizations of reality. (“Alternative
facts” seems to have been swiftly rejected.) Many outlets have upped their
fact-checking game. The Washington Post, for instance, released a browser
extension that fact-checks tweets by the president in near real-time.
Other outlets have resisted labeling Trump’s misstatements as
lies. Earlier this year, for instance, the Wall Street Journal’s owner Gerard
Baker insisted that the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t label Trump’s false
statements “lies.”
Baker argued that lying requires a “deliberate intention to
mislead,” which couldn’t be proven in the case of Trump. Baker’s critics pushed
back, raising valid and important points about the duty of the press to report
what is true.
As important as discussions about the role of the press as
fact-checkers are, in this case Baker’s critics are missing the point. Baker is
right. Trump isn’t lying. He’s bullshitting. And that’s an important
distinction to make.
Bullshitter-in-chief?
Bullshitters, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote in his
1986 essay “On Bullshit,” don’t care whether what they are saying is factually
correct or not. Instead, bullshit is characterized by a “lack of connection to
a concern with truth [and] indifference to how things really are.” Frankfurt
explains that a bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe
reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his
purpose.”
In addition to being unconcerned about the truth (which liars
do care about, since they are trying to conceal it), Frankfurt suggests that
bullshitters don’t really care whether their audience believes what they are
saying. Indeed, getting the audience to believe something is false isn’t the
goal of bullshitting. Rather, bullshitters say what they do in an effort to
change how the audience sees them, “to convey a certain impression” of
themselves.
In Trump’s case, much of his rhetoric and speech seems
designed to inflate his own grand persona. Hence the tweets about improving the
record sales of artists performing at his inauguration and his claims that he
“alone can fix” the problems in the country.
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J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Jackie Evancho's album sales have skyrocketed
after announcing her Inauguration performance.Some people just don't understand
the "Movement"
9:52 PM - 4 Jan 2017
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Likewise, his inaugural address contained much rhetoric about
the “decayed” state of the country and rampant unemployment (a verifiably false
statement). Trump then proceeded to claim that he was going to rid the country
of these ailments. The image of Trump as a larger-than-life figure who will
repair a broken country resonates with his audience, and it doesn’t work
without first priming them with notions of widespread “carnage.”
A stinky, slippery slope
There are several problems with Trump adopting the bullshit
style of communication.
First, misinformation is notoriously hard to correct once
it’s out there, and social media, in particular, has a reputation for spreading
factually inaccurate statements and conspiracy theories.
One study, for instance, examined five years of Facebook
posts about conspiracy theories. The authors found that people tend to latch
onto stories that fit their preexisting narratives about the world and share
those stories with their social circle. The result is a “proliferation of
biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust, and paranoia.”
Another study examined Twitter rumors following the Boston Marathon bombing in
2013. These researchers explored how misinformation about the identity of a
suspected terrorist abounded on the social media platform. They found that
although corrections to the error eventually emerged, they didn’t have the same
reach as the original misinformation.
Second, because Trump’s communication style relies heavily on
anger, people who are predisposed to his message may become even less critical
of potential bunk. Research suggests that when people are angry, they evaluate
misinformation in a partisan way, typically accepting the misleading claims
that favor their own political party. One study, for instance, primed
participants by having them write essays that made them feel angry about a
political issue. The authors then presented them with misinformation about the
issue that either came from their own party or the opposing party. Participants
who felt angry were more likely to believe their party’s misinformation than
people who were primed to feel anxious or neutral.
Finally, a communications strategy based on bullshit
inherently makes enemies of anyone who would seek to reinstate the truth and
expose his statements as bunk. Journalists, scientists, experts and even
government officials who disagree with him are subject to charges of
ineptitude, partisanship or conspiracy. They’re then threatened with restrictions
on funding, access and speech. We’ve already seen this happening with the
suggestion that Environmental Protection Agency data may undergo review by
political appointees before being made public.
In fairness, Trump may very well believe the things that he’s
saying. He was recently quoted as saying “I don’t like to lie.” And people can
convince themselves of things that aren’t true.
There’s some evidence, for instance, that he avoided
information that Muslims in New Jersey didn’t actually celebrate the terrorist
attacks on September 11th, as he claimed. Like all of us, Trump may be putting
up psychological defenses to avoid accepting information that challenges his
worldviews, as research suggests all of us do. So although he’s corrected
frequently by journalists and on social media, it’s a very real possibility
that he’s simply shut out anyone or any source of information that threatens
his way of seeing things.
But this is of little comfort. Trump has an affinity for
speaking mistruths with little consideration for their factual accuracy.
Combine this with his relentless efforts to discredit anyone who challenges his
declarations and his heavy use of social media – where posts and tweets can go
viral with little context and no fact-checking – and it sets the stage for a
dangerous turn in American political and civil discourse.
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