NM2303 Fake news, Lies and Spin:

How to sift fact from fiction

Week 05 Lecture: News Consumers - Automatic Responses

Francesca Nathan

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Introduction

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Where we are
WK TOPIC
1 Introduction (cancelled)
2 Introduction & media manipulation
3 News Purposes & Methods
4 News consumer: thinking
5 Automatic responses
6 Analytic responses
Mid term break
7 News Stories
8 Completeness
9 Sources
10 Evidence
11 Visualisations
12 Explanations
13 Conclusion 3
Warmup

What are the main topics?

Warmup

What are the main topics?

1. The Tripartite Model
2. The automatic system
3. Emotional responses
4. The PAD Model
5. Exploiting news consumers
Today's session

It is wonderful to see some of the amazing and interesting

connections you all are making between various concepts
in the readings and aspects of your experience on social
media.

Today we will address the main issues that arose about

AUTOMATIC SYSTEM:
• Responding automatically
• Environments
Let's look at a simple story in order to develop an a
concrete appreciation of how our minds tend to work.

First, we usually form (or have) a specific belief - e.g., a

"picture" of how we think things are (or should be).
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In order to justify this picture (belief), we look for evidence in
the world.

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Specifically, we look for pieces that will complete our
existing picture – and we ignore pieces that won’t.

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This example of different coloured jigsaw pieces might seem
silly or unrelated to reality, but imagine a murderer is being
hunted and you see this person walking in the snow.

If you quickly decide this must be the murderer, exactly the

same process of confirmation bias will be at work (identify
the pieces that fit, ignore the ones that don't).
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The automatic system
The automatic system

Our AUTOMATIC SYSTEM system consists of four main sub-

systems:
• Conditioned responses: responses we have been
conditioned to make when we encounter specific
environmental cues ("triggers")
• Adaptive responses: genetic inheritance
• Practised responses: whatever we have automated
through practice (e.g., typing)
• Emotional responses

Helpful mnemonic: "CAPE"

The automatic system

Although different kinds of automatic responses become

part of our AUTOMATIC SYSTEM in different ways, they all
work the same way:
• There is an association between an environmental
cue and an automatic response
• When our perceptual systems detect such cues,
the response fires.
In order to appreciate how our AUTOMATIC SYSTEM simply
fires when triggered, consider Braitenberg Vehicles.

These “vehicles” were proposals by the neuroscientist Valentino

Braitenberg to explain how complex behaviour could be
explained by very simple patterns of sensors and motors.
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VIDEO: link

Each of the behaviours is based on detecting a cue in the

environment (e.g., light, shadow, physical boundary) that
triggers an associated response (e.g., turn, back up).
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Environment

• The Braitenberg vehicles are only meant to demonstrate

that our AUTOMATIC responses are triggered by
recognised cues.

Notice what this means about our AUTOMATIC SYSTEM

• It doesn't plan – it lives in the "eternal present".
• It doesn't "think about" whether something is true or
not.
• Any cue it detects is "true" in the sense that a detected
cue results in an automatic response.
The automatic system

• Since this is the way our AUTOMATIC SYSTEM operates,

the environment has an enormous influence upon us.
• This doesn’t mean our AUTOMATIC responses are
always simple
• We can train ourselves to respond to very complex
patterns
• AUTOMATIC responses can include:
• Reading simple sentences like this one
• Professional gymnasts training complicated routines
until they are automatic
Environment

"I would have thought that our Automatic System is crucial for
us to survive in new and hostile environments”

• Imagine one of the light-seeking vehicles is put down

near a forest fire. Will it be able to use its light-seeking
heuristic to save itself?

• In a world of constant communication, what heuristics

(that news consumers use) can be exploited by “hostile”
advertisements and disinformation?
Environment

“..would it not be accurate to say that the Automatic System

would be crucial by being on alert in this brave new world of
hostile advertisements and disinformation agents?”

Keep in mind: being more or less alert or attentive is not a

function of our AUTOMATIC SYSTEM – it simply responds
automatically if the appropriate cue is detected.
Environment

• We often think our beliefs and decisions are stable – beliefs

that are not influenced by the situation or context.
• But the heuristics and biases research makes it pretty clear
how easily our beliefs can be influenced in different ways.
• Remember: our AUTOMATIC SYSTEM is extremely
dependent on context – and our AUTOMATIC SYSTEM
responses have an enormous impact on our actions and
beliefs.
• Among the most significant situational/environmental
factors are framing effects: our beliefs and choices are
influenced by the way information is framed.
Environment
Cafes and restaurants fail to collect customers' data
Cafes and restaurants struggle to collect customers' data

We have seen how headlines and news stories can use

different frames to present the same story.
Environment
Abortion is murder.
Abortion is about a woman's right to choose.

And many advertisers, politicians, and activists understand

that framing is crucial.

If you watch experienced debaters, you will notice how they

often refuse to engage with the frame set by their
opponents.

And as we have seen, we also tend to stick to our "frames",

accepting only the pieces that fit our mental pictures (frames)
Environment
Surgical procedure: the one-month survival rate is 90%.
Surgical procedure: there is 10% mortality in the first month.

Framing effects also influence choices that are more

obviously objective or logically equivalent.

This can have significant real-world consequences: doctors

tend to be influenced by framing effects as well – and may
be more likely to recommend procedures that are framed in
terms of success over the same procedures if they are
framed in terms of failure.
Environment

Surgical procedure: the one-month survival rate is 90%.

Surgical procedure: there is 10% mortality in the first month.

• Our AUTOMATIC system is responding strongly here.

• It is not doing complicated math or logical reasoning,
but rather responding emotionally to the words
survival and mortality.
• Mortality is bad, survival is good.
• 90% survival sounds encouraging and 10% mortality is
frightening.
Environment

Surgical procedure: the one-month survival rate is 90%.

Surgical procedure: there is 10% mortality in the first month.

Brain scans of people responding to such statements

show:
• Emotional part of brain lighting up when they accept
the framing.
• "Conflict" part of brain lighting up when they force
the engagement of ANALYTIC system ("think twice
about automatic response").
Environment
Surgical procedure: the one-month survival rate is 90%.
Surgical procedure: there is 10% mortality in the first month.

Be careful!
• If you have trained your ANALYTIC mind on the logical
equivalence of such statements, you might think:
• "it is obvious that these are logically equivalent"
• "I don't feel the appeal of one over the other"
• However, all the evidence suggests that your AUTOMATIC
response is still the same as everyone else.
• The difference is that you have trained your ANALYTIC mind to
quickly and effortlessly over-ride the AUTOMATIC response for
this specific kind of problem.
Environment

Surgical procedure: the one-month survival rate is 90%.

Surgical procedure: there is 10% mortality in the first month.

Notice two important consequences of framing effects:

1. Because logically equivalent statements trigger
different reactions, it is impossible for humans to be
reliably rational in their analysis. (Yes, you can learn
to over-ride certain framing effects, but you are
always susceptible to others.)
2. Framing (and other) effects mean that we can be
exploited by environmental/situational factors.
Environment

Let’s do a quick poll so that you reflect on your own beliefs

about the potential influence of environmental or situational
cues.
VIDEO: link

To see how much of an influence environmental factors

have, let's watch this brief video about asking advertising
experts to come up with a promotional poster. 29
Emotional responses
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Clarification: there is one scenario where people will share if
they experience a low activation emotion (such as sadness)
— when the information is very surprising.

For example: sad (low activation) plus surprising

(unexpected death).
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Some of you raised this example and asked how to reconcile
the PAD model and the fact that so many people shared/liked
the sad news about Boseman’s death.

Let's do a quick poll about what you all think.

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Exploiting news consumers
BREAKOUT DISCUSSION

Go to the linked Google document and work in your teams

to answer the questions about the PAD model.

LINK: https://docs.google.com/document/d/
17xBv927ptvf3NJXNXahH3cI5M3RZ_4gi43MvLESn9ck/
edit?usp=sharing
Based on the PAD diagram, each group
should evaluate these two headlines:

1. Black hearted maid put baby’s hand

into hot pot to ‘cook’ at Buangkok
Link!

2. Group of Vietnamese guys and

ladies giving out free masks outside
Punggol MRT station

For each of those headlines:

1. Classify it in one of the four main areas of the PAD model. Propose a
brief justification of why your team classifies it there.

2. Transform the headline so that the facts remain the same, but the
emotional appeal puts it into one of the other three main areas of the
PAD model. Propose a brief justification of why your team things your
new version causes the headline to go in the new area of the PAD
model. 36
What can we do?

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What to do

• W have been learning a lot about our biases and

the way our AUTOMATIC SYSTEM can respond in
problematic ways to information.
• So, what can we do practically to protect
ourselves and others?
• Do we need to do SIFT or extensive fact-checking
on everything?
What to do

• As noted earlier, engaging our ANALYTICAL SYSTEM for

everything would be exhausting even if it was possible.
• Practically, it is important to develop the skill of identifying
whether some claim could do significant damage to
ourselves or others (if we share).
• So, whether celebrity gossip or an amusing cat video is true
or false, this is unlikely to have a significant impact on our
lives.
• Posts about divisive issues will have an impact – stories
about the issues that divide opinion (immigrant workers,
foreigners accepted to NUS, whether there is institutional
racism or prejudice in the society, HDB and CPF restrictions )
What to do

• Aside from trying to separate the content into trivial or

potentially damaging, one of the most effective things
to do is learn to recognise your own emotional
reactions when you have them.
• It may seem obvious that we all do this, but again the
evidence suggests that many of us are not good at
recognising when we have emotional responses (or
even what those responses are)
• This connects to the first step of SIFT – just stop
Broadly, these are the practical steps for identifying
potentially damaging disinformation:
1. Understand how your mind impacts your tendency to
accept and share fake news, learn about the potential
damage of believing/sharing disinformation, and so on.
2. Learn how to improve your rational thinking.
3. For social media posts:
1. Train yourself to STOP when you have an impulse to share.
2. Ask yourself: "Could the opposite of what I believe be
true"? This activates ANALYTICAL SYSTEM.
3. If consequences of believing/sharing might be significant,
do the rest of SIFT.

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Broadly, these are the practical steps for identifying
potentially damaging disinformation (continued):
4. When actively seeking and analysing more detailed
information (e.g., entire stories):
1. Learn the main criteria to evaluate news stories (Sceptical
Knowing)
2. Use rational thinking to apply those criteria and evaluate
the stories

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What to do
When we enter the second half of the semester and start looking at full stories
(as opposed to the short things we see on social media), the following tips will
also help:
• Resist your first impressions: constantly remind yourself that you're
unaware of your first impression.
• Try changing your mind: find at least two pieces concrete evidence for
the opposite of your impression. If your impression is that someone is
rigid and inflexible, try to think of concrete examples where the person
was flexible and changed. (Notice how easy it is for our minds to think
of examples confirming our existing impression/picture)
• Train your unconscious mind. If you know that you have a bias against
religious people, every time you interact with someone religious,
remind yourself of a religious person you admire (e.g., Mother Teresa
or). If you do this enough, your automatic system will
Closing
Assignment: multitasking task

• TIP: When you do the multitasking question on the

Assignment, it will be most effective if you try to keep
the requested information in mind while
completing the task (e.g., repeating the information to
yourself).
• You won't experience multi-tasking if you just scan the
information and then "hope you remember" but
otherwise don't try to keep it active in your mind while
you perform the various matching tasks.
Up Next

This week:
• Assignments due: Automatic Responses
• Tutorials: Automatic Responses
• Reading: complete Analytic Responses reading/
discussion in Perusall

Next week:
• Lecture: Analytic Responses
One more thing
VIDEO: card trick video

In order to experience the kind of thing that happens to your AUTOMATIC

SYSTEM when your ANALYTIC SYSTEM is engaged, let's watch this video
of a card trick.

(Even if you have seen this video before, you can still experience what tends
to happen to first-time viewers. Just focus on the card trick the way you did
the first time you watched the video.)

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Thank you!

See you at tutorials this week!

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