The first part of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Misinformation and media-literacy researcher Matthew Facciani joins us to discuss how he defines misinformation at a time when even the term itself is polarizing, why there’s so much misinformation about health and wellness in particular, how to navigate the current information landscape given the continued erosion of trust in institutions, and why people with certain ideologies are more likely to believe claims about “forbidden knowledge.” Behind the paywall, we get into how to avoid falling for misinformation (especially in an information environment that rewards outrage and extremism), how people’s social networks and identities affect their susceptibility to misinformation, why even very smart people fall for misinformation, and more.
Matthew Facciani is a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Notre Dame in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and has a PhD in Sociology from The University of South Carolina. His research interests include media literacy, identities, social networks, political polarization, misinformation, and artificial intelligence. His forthcoming book, Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do About It, will be published by Columbia University Press. Find him on Substack at Misguided: The Newsletter.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Matthew’s forthcoming book, Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do About It
Matthew’s Substack, Misguided: The Newsletter
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Here is my conversation with Matthew Facciani. I'm really looking forward to talking with you about your research on misinformation, and there are several studies that you've done that I want to dig into as well as sort of just the larger body of research. But before we get into that, can you just tell us a little bit about how you came to get interested in misinformation in the first place?
Matthew Facciani: Yeah, sure. So I was a psychology major, and originally I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. So I'll take you through the whole journey of how I got into this. I thought I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. I was always interested in how people form beliefs and how attitudes are formed, how people process information very broadly. And I remember thinking how interesting it was to learn about some social psychology. So, like the Asch conformity studies, people are not aware of Solomon Asch in the 1950s. He was this social psychologist who had these very simple but clever experiments where he asked people to identify which lines were the same length as these lines he presented up on the wall.
And it was very easy. Most people got almost all the questions right because it's such a simple task. And then whenever he had people ahead of the participant pretend that they didn't know and got it wrong, people were much more likely to then get it wrong themselves. So this is the idea of conformity and social influence and how it can actually change how people impact information and create these biases purely from a social phenomenon.
I really found that stuff fascinating as an undergraduate. I really got interested in these ideas of social influence, but I was also really interested in brain science and neuroscience. And I ended up going into a PhD program in neuroscience right out of undergrad because I thought that's what I wanted to do. So I was doing a bunch of FMRI work. I was learning how the brain basically lights up in real time whenever people are processing different emotions, different sights, different sounds. And that was cool. It was interesting.
But I was still always interested in these broader issues of how do people process information and what kind of social influences have an impact on that. And I was interested in science outreach and thinking about science policy. So I was always thinking about these broader issues. I was fortunate that I could actually switch into a social psychology and sociology program at the same university I was doing my PhD at. So I kind of changed major as a PhD student, which is not typical and not recommended since it added a few years to my degree.
But I was able to study basically what I'm studying now. And so I started studying attitudes and beliefs, political polarization, and I started studying it from a standpoint of how social influence impacts beliefs and how who we know impacts what we believe and I connected it to political beliefs, religious beliefs.
But then as I graduated, I graduated in the summer of 2020. So I was finishing my dissertation right when Covid hit, and there was a big focus on health at the time and health misinformation and political attitudes during the pandemic. So it really got me interested in focusing more on health and politics and how all that shapes how we process information. So I took a job opportunity at Vanderbilt University studying health and health attitudes, and I started writing my book and that was a great opportunity to connect my research on social influence on health attitudes and how people process health information, such as vaccine information attitudes about COVID.
Present day, I'm currently working at the University of Notre Dame as a social scientist, still looking at information broadly, but more of a focus on media literacy and actually teaching people skills on how to navigate the information environment more critically. So trying to develop these applied studies of seeing if we can teach people how to recognize false information, and then even more recently, looking at how to teach people how to recognize AI generated deep fakes and stuff like that. So that's kind of the whole timeline on how I started from undergrad to today.
Christy Harrison: I really am so excited to hear your findings on that because I think that's extremely relevant to listeners of this podcast and every podcast and just everyone in general because we're all in such a such a stew of misinformation and just such a confusing, chaotic information environment these days, that having some strategies for sussing through it, I think is really important. I'm sure this must be a really fascinating time to be a misinformation researcher because of all that. And even the term misinformation now has become so politicized, right?
And I think it's true that one person's misinformation is another person's deeply held belief. And even though there is such a thing as objective reality out there and that we can describe it in ways that theoretically people from different sides of the political spectrum can agree on, in practice, that is not really happening. People are so siloed in their information, information bubbles and have these different realities kind of being created for them and fed to them. And so it's really hard to get any agreement. And so I think the term "misinformation," people might think that you're policing people's thoughts or telling people what to think or something like that. And of course, that's not really what you do, right?
And then I think also there are some nuances to defining what counts as misinformation when it comes to areas of genuine scientific debate. What is the best way to promote health and well being? From my perspective as an eating disorder dietitian, the debate over like diets and whether we should push people to diet and push people to lose weight for their health, or whether there's other health promoting options that don't involve that and that don't put people at risk of disordered eating. That is like a very relevant kind of scientific debate for my world.
So there are ways in which I think the term misinformation can be applied in a derogatory way or to shut down debate where it's not appropriate to use the term misinformation. And then there's also this, I think, reflexive pushing back against the term misinformation among people who maybe feel like their views are marginalized or who are just so politically polarized and are in this reality that feels to someone from my, and probably your vantage point, just a totally alternate reality. So I'm just curious your thoughts on all that and especially how you define the term misinformation given all of those considerations.
Matthew Facciani: Yeah, that's a great question. So I do think about this a lot and I often grapple between how to best present what I do to various audiences. Because you're right, different audiences are going to react differently depending on just the language you use. I still often use the word misinformation even though I know it's politicized, because I think it's an important starting off point where you can have a conversation about what that means.
So if I feel like someone is open to listening and hearing my perspective, I'll use the word misinformation and I'll describe to them exactly how I study it and what it means and what are the limitations of it. Because I think all that's important and you can actually showcase where misinformation researchers are coming from. At least the people that I know and myself, I feel like I can talk about that. So when I think about misinformation, it's a super broad definition. It's just false or misleading information. So that concludes so much and it's been an academic term for decades.
In the 80s it was often in psychology research simply referring to misleading information regarding memory and how people's memories can be distorted if you present them with false information or misinformation. It might bias them to think about a memory differently. So that's kind of where it stems from. It's very academic, information science type of perspective. And unfortunately, it has become politicized and I do think there is some fair criticism there.
I think it's unfortunate when people are very definitive in describing what is and is not misinformation to the point where it's very aggressively attacking people, and it's coming from a place of looking down on certain people. I think that creates this vibe of, oh, that person's just speaking down to me and they're trying to attack these views that I have. And it can be really tricky because if those views that they have are related to something that is connected to a health issue that could cause harm, then I think it is important to call that false or misleading information.
Such as, we think back to Covid. There was these viral Facebook posts about drinking bleach as a treatment for the COVID-19. That's a pretty clear example of false or misleading information that's harmful. And I think it's fair to label it as such. So it does get really tricky. But I do try to be mindful about the term and try to be open about how we should also be careful when labeling things as misinformation.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's a great point. I appreciate your nuance with that. It is tricky. And I also try to talk in ways here that are not denigrating of people's views, but presenting what the science actually says and critically unpacking it. And I have coined the term compassionate skepticism for my approach. It's also tricky. The word skepticism now, I feel like, gets applied in different ways, but I'm coming from a tradition of scientific skeptic critically unpacking claims and alternative health and wellness views from the perspective of science and being rooted in evidence and also looking critically at that evidence and what it can and can't tell us and all of that, but also trying to do that leading with compassion.
Because I've been there. I, myself, was very bought into alternative health and wellness approaches 15 to 20 years ago, and had my own issues going on. I still have multiple chronic health conditions, and it took a long time to get them diagnosed and went through a lot with the conventional healthcare system that made me feel very alienated or unsupported. And the same time I was working in environmental journalism. That was my first career, covering things like organic foods and sustainability.
And at one point I worked at a green lifestyle magazine. So it really was about the personal choices that people were making to support environmental causes. And that crunchy world as we're seeing now with MAHA, Make America Healthy Again, and RFK Jr. That crunchy world is a real gateway into, I think, a lot of misinformation about health and wellness that is very harmful. That can be very harmful. I was there. I was very bought into it.
I tried to fix things with food and supplements and diets that ultimately made things a lot worse for me and kind of went through this whole journey of healing from disordered eating to see how caught up my beliefs about health and wellness were in this disordered relationship with food and my body. And I think that's true for many people and I think for many listeners, especially of this podcast, we're kind of in the same place of like, trying to untangle the disordered eating from all of that stuff.
But I'm just curious from your perspective, with health and wellness misinformation specifically, I have seen it proliferate so much, and I don't know if that's just because of my vantage point that I'm a hammer and everything looks like a nail. But I'm curious for you, how have you seen it spread and change over the course of your career? And why do you think there is so much misinformation specifically about health and wellness in the first place?
Matthew Facciani: Why do I think there's so much misinformation about health and wellness? I think there's a few reasons for that. One is it's something that's so central to everyone's lives. Thinking about our health is one of the biggest parts about being human. We're in this physical being that deteriorates and has health problems and it's something we're always thinking about. And I think it's so central to all of us. And it's such a scary thing to confront our mortality and how we struggle with just the uncertainty of life, that we're always going to be vulnerable to people sharing simple solutions that give us a feeling of control.
So because of that, there's this built in vulnerability. If you're struggling with any type of health issue and you go to the doctor and they're like, well, this is really complicated. We don't exactly know how to help you, but here are some things that could help and we have to test and see all these things. That's not always a very fulfilling direction. Even if it's just the best available science we have and the doctors are doing their best. It's just some unique case that they're trying their best to help you with.
You can contrast that with, okay, I found this influencer on Instagram or TikTok and they say you take this supplement and you're going to feel better and you can take control of your health. That's such a massive contrast to the more external and loss of control direction that is a lot of the healthcare system. And again, just reality. Sometimes it's really unfortunate that again, we don't have the best medical knowledge of every health condition in the world right now. It's just there's a big gap there still. And even though we've made such impressive gains in health and medicine, there's still a long way to go.
So I think that that central component is built into our psychology that to mitigate uncertainty and to gain a sense of control, we're vulnerable to those ideas of these wellness influencers or however you want to describe those who give people a sense of control by peddling something that is not backed up by evidence but gives the illusion that they can take control of their health if only they do this very simple, straightforward, forward step/process that is often connected to some financial motivation too.
So that's the first part I think about is the, the psychological aspect of it, but then there's the whole institutional part and this is where it gets tricky as well because this is where there are some kernels of truth by wellness influencers or people critical of medical institutions, healthcare institutions. There's a lot of failings by healthcare institutions and you can look at examples of healthcare and help big pharma companies not always acting the most ethically and not always behaving in a way that we think are they're looking out for our best interests. And that's true of a lot of major companies. It's not unique to big pharma or any healthcare company like that. But people struggle with this and it directly impacts people's lives and there's a lot of warranted skepticism and distrust built into our institutions who haven't always done the best job. There's legitimate concerns that we have about these big institutions and companies.
So again, people can take advantage of those warranted skepticism and concerns and take it up to a point where I don't think is based in reality anymore and then claim that everything this company does is bad, you can't trust them at all. And that's where it becomes in the realm of misinformation and these misguided perspectives where for example, with the vaccine and the COVID vaccine and just vaccines in general, they actually don't even make that much money for these pharmaceutical companies, which I always find is an interesting point because they're often attacked as these big money makers like oh, they just want to inject people with, with these foreign substances and make a ton of money. And the reality is they're one of the smallest amounts of revenue for these major companies because they work so well and they just prevent the illness or drastically reduce the symptoms and it's often a one or two time thing.
It's such a massive health win that we had these vaccines in the last couple hundred years be developed. This thing has been studied for such a long time, that you give someone a small dose of something and it can give them this immune response and it helps them so much and there's so much overwhelming evidence. So it makes me frustrated to see that particular medical invention and accomplishment be attacked because one of the best ones we have, and again it's one of the least revenue producing ones of these big pharma companies.
All of that to say, a lot of this comes down to trust. And if big pharma companies and health institutions lose our trust, then people are going to seek out other options. And it's much easier to have a parasocial relationship and build trust through some influencer who may not be based in any type of empirical evidence and their supplement may have no evidence of it helping you at all. But if you trust them and you trust this person on your phone, you can actually see their face and they seem genuine to you and maybe they are thinking they're actually helping you. Maybe from their perspective they really believe in their supplement.
But again, it's so different from the personalized influencer in your phone talking to you every day and building that trust versus this amorphous abstract conglomerate of a company or an institution where it's easy to think, oh, they don't have my best interests in heart compared to this influencer who seems to genuinely care about me. So that's my long spiel on how wellness and health has been such a fertile ground for misinformation today.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I really appreciate that. And that aligns with a lot of what I have found as well, and just reading other people's research and thinking in my own sphere about how people are attracted to health and wellness misinformation. And I think this notion of lack of trust in institutions, in industries has reached such an inflection point I think now, because I've been thinking about this lately how RFK Jr and his ilk have come up and made a name for themselves over the years and decades by attacking institutions and pointing out in some cases, rightly, that these institutions have failings but then pitching themselves or their approach as the answer, right?
So it's like, actually it's the vaccines and the answer is not to get vaccinated and to do these detoxes or whatever if you have been vaccinated or related things in alternative medicine spheres. And now we have these people in charge of our institutions, right? Like, RFK Jr. is at the top of the US pyramid when it comes to the health institutions. He is now in charge and the administration has been stripping away various words and language and taking away funding for people who have certain words in their funding applications and all of this stuff. So it's a really scary time for a lot of us.
I think the lack of trust in institutions has now reached us, right? For the most part, I used to be not across the board trusting of institutions. I always thought critically about them and critically analyzed against what the science said, what these guidelines mean and how do we interpret them and how do they square with the data and with things like vaccines, yes, the guidelines very much square with the evidence that vaccines are safe and effective and all of that.
And now I think we're gonna see this real disconnect between what the institutions say and what the science says. Although, also I think there's gonna be some pollution of the science as well, right? This effort to bend science to a political will by funding studies that maybe are not actually based in sound ideas or whatever, and they're more based on ideology and all of that. So I think it's a really tricky time for trust right now, even among people who did previously perhaps have some remaining trust in institutions.
So I know this is kind of a big question and we're all probably grappling through it together, but do you have any thoughts on how people who are in that position of maybe having been disillusioned by institutions in the healthcare system for various reasons and now seeing what's happening in our government, it's tempting, I think, for some people to just be like, screw it all. I'm just gonna walk away from it all and take it all into my own hands. But that, of course, as we've talked about, leaves people vulnerable to so much misinformation and harm and potential grift and all of that. So how are you thinking about navigating this landscape?
Matthew Facciani: Yeah, it's definitely a challenge and you're right, we're seeing attacks on science and public health that are unprecedented. I think it's not alarmist to state that. It's a very different time, unfortunately. And I worry that science and public health are often things that people take for granted and don't really appreciate them until they're gone. That makes such a challenge in advocating for them, because it's like, okay, we need these things oftentimes in preparation for some bad event that could happen.
For example, with the pandemic, over time, there was a reduction of pandemic funding and funding for these health institutions and importantly, from my perspective, there really wasn't much funding on communication and social science of these health institutions. So it would have been nice if we had that funding ahead of time whenever this bad event happened. And I think it's similar for these scientific institutions, where we don't really fully appreciate their worth and value until we start seeing them be removed and we see people get sicker and people struggle more and that's a really challenging thing to advocate for something that is so important but can be more abstract.
So that's one thought I have about it is that. That challenge, and I think what would have been really helpful is if we had scientists actively working with their communities and building these interpersonal relationships with people in their local communities so they could actually meet scientists and public health officials and actually put a face to them.
Christy Harrison: Like town halls or something for scientists and public health officials.
Matthew Facciani: Right, exactly. And I think slowly now there's some more traction about that. I know universities are slowly trying to embrace more science communication, actually built in for their professors, but only on the margins. It's still not really something that is widespread, unfortunately. So I think if we were to move forward and try to think about this as an opportunity, it could be a way where these institutions rebuild and actually value the importance of science communication, science outreach, and just working with their local communities instead of being so siloed. And that's one potential silver lining if we go that direction. The future is so murky and unpredictable.
If there's one optimistic take I can try to share, I do hope that we go that direction. I think there's a lot of people speaking about the importance of going that direction. So there's a chance we could rebuild and become better and get past this, in many ways, deserved distrust that scientific and medical institutions have. So I hope we can go that direction. That's something that I have been trying to do with my work and I know with your work and just having more science communicators speak to more diverse groups of people I think will go a long way. So that's one direction that I think we can go.
Christy Harrison: I really agree with that. I think it's important to have open discussions about science and help people kind of understand how it applies to their lives and how it's conducted and take it out of these murky shadows that people sometimes start to think that science is in, like the global cabal idea of vaccine scientists or whatever, big pharma people. And again, there's warranted skepticism towards some of those companies, I think in a limited way, not the totalizing skepticism that I think happens with movements like anti-vaccine or things like that.
But to be able to meet somebody who is a scientist and hear scientists communicate their findings in a way that's accessible is so helpful to understanding how we can use this knowledge in our everyday lives and just helps people be less afraid of it and less critical of it, helping them think more critically about it. Relatedly, I think what you're talking about here is a message of transparency, of being more open about science and not having this be some closed off, elite thing that people don't have access to. It made me think of your recent article on forbidden knowledge, the study that you did with a colleague that shows people who believe certain knowledge is being suppressed or censored can have very different reactions to that.
I'm curious to hear what your team found because some of your top line findings were that conservatives were more likely to be attracted to and believe forbidden knowledge claims than liberals who showed decreased interest and belief when information was presented as being censored and conservatives also were shown to make more critical thinking errors and a reasoning task about vaccine risk when information was presented as being censored. Can you talk about these findings and why you think there was such polarization on political lines and also how that might fit in with this larger conversation we're having about transparency?
Matthew Facciani: Yeah, so when we did that study, it was right in the height of COVID 19 and the discussion around treatments and whether or not if certain cures and treatments are being suppressed from people such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, that was the ongoing discussion in the social media ecosystem that we wanted to try to capture. And there was definitely this politicized notion of it where conservatives were thinking these certain statements were being censored and not discussed as much as they should be. And we thought that was an opportunity to examine this idea of permitted knowledge framing.
So not just seeing the statement such as there's this treatment that's being hidden from you, such as Ivermectin, but if it's framed in a way that they are hiding this from you, then that will actually increase the likelihood of conservatives thinking it's true and wanting to share it and generally finding that more interesting and more attractive. So as you mentioned, that's what we found. So this idea of framing the forbidden knowledge in a way that is being hidden from you and when it aligns with your political attitudes, it's more interesting to people. And we did just focus on conservatives in this study. So that's one limitation. We didn't have a comparison for liberal rules, but again, given the timeline of when we collected the data, there was this very salient example that made a lot of sense that we thought we could capture.
It kind of sums up a lot of what we were describing earlier, that if things are presented in a way that are not transparent or not being shown to everyone equally, then it does make people very skeptical, especially given this lack of distrust in institutions. There's this extra layer going on there. We do find that this bias of, not just the political bias, but this enhanced bias of the forbidden knowledge framing itself. I think that's really important to consider when we talk about information, we need to be very mindful of not even presenting a perspective that we're trying to hide something and just be open and transparent as much as possible.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, this is probably a million dollar question, but I'm curious with that challenge in mind, how can people avoid falling for misinformation? How can science communicators and scientists help people avoid falling for misinformation without making them feel like they're being talked down to or that somebody is judging their beliefs as misinformation, and so they're not even going to listen because this person just doesn't get it?
Matthew Facciani: Yeah, it's definitely a challenging question, but there is some research and some work looking into this.
