Clara Pretus, neurologist: ‘There are evil agents who are profiting by generating this nervousness’

Few people know the minds of extremists like the neuroscientist Clara Pretus, 36, because she has literally looked inside them. In her most celebrated work, the researchers scanned the brains of young people who wanted to participate in violent jihadist acts to understand the personal and social mechanisms that activated this interest.

In a more recent work, her team studied the grey matter of voters of Spain’s far-right Vox party to understand why they spread lies on issues important to them, such as immigration. The research revealed that when these topics were discussed, regions of the participants’ social brain were activated. “These are not the usual decision-making areas but those that help infer the thoughts of others,” explains Pretus from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In other words, they share false information with the group’s approval and cohesion in mind.

Pretus — who is an advisor to the United Nations Office on Terrorism and director of the Social Brain Lab — warns that a tragedy like the flash flooding in the Spanish region of Valencia create fertile ground for disinformation to spread. “When you are in danger, it is better for you to believe any information that can save you or that can help you,” she says.

However, she also criticizes the way certain political actors exploit such crises for their own advantage. Pretus notes that in times of anxiety and danger, opportunists often use emotionally charged language to “hack our nervous system.” “We must take this into account, because there will be more and more emergencies of this type, very conducive to disinformation and political gain,” says Pretus.

Question. The very night of the floods in Valencia, when people realized that the situation was very serious, the political blame-game started.

Answer. We are not used to something like this, it creates uncertainty, alarm and a sense of emergency, and it makes us rely on the little that we know. And the biases that we have already incorporated, whether consciously or unconsciously, come to the surface more intensely. For example, our social identity or political identity, the beliefs of a certain party and that vision of the world: who are the enemies, who are the allies... You rely on that in moments of uncertainty. And so we are going to be biased when we look for information, how we process it and it even affects how we perceive it. A person, whether on the left or the right, looks at the points of information that most confirm their pre-existing beliefs. There is an experiment on climate change where they show the temperature curve of the last centuries to liberals and conservatives in the United States. They follow their gaze and see that the liberals look at the last decades, they focus their attention where the most dramatic rise in temperature occurs. On the other hand, the conservatives do not pay particular attention to this last part of the graph. Even if we read the same news, we focus on the parts that confirm our worldview.

We consume disinformation because we want to reaffirm our belonging

P. Identity predisposes us to consume misinformation.

A. What we tend to do is look for things that reaffirm us as members of the group, trying to safeguard those things that put it in a good position. This is one of the proposals made to explain why we consume disinformation: to reaffirm our sense of belonging, not only on an abstract level, but also with our immediate environment, such as the audience we have on social networks. We are motivated to share information that we know our audience will receive well and that will serve to reaffirm us. And this is more important the more critical the information is. For example, in an emergency or when it is key to the group’s identity.

Q. Do we spread a hoax because we turn off our critical spirit, because it is a hoax that proves us right?

A. There are different reasons. Some are more cognitive: I don’t have time to pay attention or I don’t have the ability to look at this information critically and fact-check it. Then there is an educational aspect: a layer of protection is needed that education provides, to see the specific techniques used to spread disinformation, such as the use of false experts, negative emotions, and so on. And finally, there is the more partisan motivation, which also plays a role. Strategies have been developed that work for the average citizen with the most cognitive and most pedagogical approach, with some success. In reality, most disinformation is shared by a minimal percentage of internet users. It is a small but radicalized group that puts out most of the disinformation we consume. The problem is that for them, none of these strategies are effective because their motivations are different.

Q. Because it is deliberate.

A. It may be 100% deliberate, it may be in bad faith. And it may be a bit fanatical: the individuals may be very blinded by an ideology and when they see this information, their blood boils and they have to share it.

The spread of disinformation must have legal consequences. Otherwise, we will not be able to create a healthy information environment

Q. In that sense, how do you see fact-checking strategies, combating each hoax, when there is a large machinery behind them producing them?

A. At the moment, fact-checking strategies have very limited effectiveness. They may reduce the spread by a very small percentage. There are initiatives and tools, but they are by no means sufficient. We have seen this in the case of the flooding in Spain and I think there will be many changes in this regard. Above all, because the spread of misinformation must have legal consequences. Because if not, we will not be able to create a healthy information environment, where people can exercise their right to make decisions based on truthful information.

Q. Should laws be passed against hoaxes?

A. Yes, because it can’t be acceptable that there are no consequences. But that is a very slow system to stop misinformation. To make it faster, we are experimenting with another approach: crowdsourcing, that is, open collaboration between users. It is an emerging idea, but we think it could be a faster system: that users can verify information on social networks.

Q. But studies show that when someone wants to correct us, it’s important that it’s someone in your group, someone you trust. It’s crucial to have people with enough courage and intellectual honesty to call people out within their group.

A. This is important, but it cannot be forced. It is difficult to influence what happens within a group. There is a study in the U.S. that shows that verification of comments coming from the opposite side not only does not work, but it makes the other side angrier and even more in agreement with the initial comment. When it comes from within the group itself, it is much more reliable, much more effective, but it is difficult. Ideally, there should be a social norm that says it is desirable to be critical of one’s own group. There should be an almost a moral value, which would be above our partisan interests, which is honesty.

Trump's arrival reinforced impunity in the face of lies and misinformation

Q. We can also award more importance to other types of entities. In these polarized times, we are broken down into a single identity: politics. But we have more identities, we share more things, we are parents, we are Barça fans... Can we generate trust in another identity area to resolve this?

A. It is a strategy that is being used with regard to climate change. Many Republicans in the United States are very skeptical, but when their identity as parents is appealed to, they are more open to improving the future conditions of their children. If I ask you about climate change, appealing first to your identity as a parent, you answer me differently. It is valuable to know that we have multiple identities and that we can appeal to them to be closer to the truth of the information.

Q. Was there a polarizing breeding ground that crystallized in the pandemic and has now become exacerbated again?

A. Yes, even before that, I think that Trump’s arrival reinforced impunity in the face of lies and misinformation. And then there have been a series of hard blows that have made people more desperate, more uncertain. And the media that we follow, the leaders that we listen to, have a super-important role. We recently did an experiment in the U.S., where we paid people to stop following hyper-partisan accounts for a month, both Democrats and Republicans. And we saw that there was a reduction in people’s political attitudes. There was less animosity towards the political opponent, towards the opposing group. And they were also exposed to less misinformation. In other words, our information diet has an impact on maintaining this state of inflammatory nervousness. Or reducing it if we disconnect from these sources. It is not just disasters like the pandemic or the flash floods, but there are actually agents of evil who are profiting and making a lot of money, investing a lot of money, in generating this nervousness and desperation.

We cannot leave citizens alone in the face of misinformation

Q. We follow these types of hyper-polarized accounts because they give us satisfaction. Should we all make a personal effort to reduce that type of exposure?

A. Absolutely, but there is always a problem with individual responsibility. First, because it is impossible. That is to say, if you are already reflecting on this, it is because you may not need it. And second, obviously structural changes at the political level, in terms of European regulation, are much more effective. There is always a tendency to shift responsibility to the individual. But people are working 10 hours a day, they have time limitations, they have to scrutinize information while trying to get through their day. They have a responsibility, but the change has to be more structural, more profound. And we cannot leave citizens alone in the face of misinformation.

Q. Speaking of loneliness, does social isolation and loneliness, which is reinforced on social media, play a role?

A. Yes, absolutely. It’s because we work remotely, we don’t go out, we don’t meet other people... And meeting up with people is a dose of reality. Some people say that working is good because it forces you to be compatible with reality. Because when we’re alone we start to go online and you end up in corners of the internet without even knowing how you got there. Many times, when you share it with someone, when you externalize it, it sounds ridiculous to you while you’re telling it. It’s very, very important to have social interaction and this has been proven by many studies. Loneliness has many drawbacks, it reduces life expectancy, and one of the drawbacks is that if you lock yourself in your own mind and on top of that you have access to the internet, it takes you to increasingly radicalized places, towards more extreme content. It’s very good to be in contact with people in real life.

Q. But it is increasingly difficult to find those points of friction, since we surround ourselves with like-minded people.

A. Yes, and extreme situations like Spain’s flooding make you polarized in your personal life too. You stop seeing certain people. For example, Brexit caused a restructuring of friendships. It has an impact on your personal relationships, but at the same time it is in personal relationships where it is easier to express different identities. Interaction in three dimensions provides the opportunity to connect on other levels. It is much more nuanced, there are interdependencies, you have emotional ties.

It is easier to justify violence if there is no shared reality

Q. The solution is to connect more in three dimensions.

A. In four dimensions, because time is also there.

Q. And how will the wild episode of disinformation we are experiencing affect us in the future? Will it generate problems of social cohesion?

A. Erosion of the fabric of social cohesion, yes, 100%. And also a crisis of confidence in institutions, clearly. People keep repeating: “We are in a failed state.” People are incorporating this type of information, and trust in these democratic institutions that are here to, in principle, safeguard our peaceful coexistence is deteriorating further. The great threat of polarization is violence: if we lose the notion of a shared reality and anything goes, any narrative is valid, this favors the justification of violence. It is easier to justify the use of violence because this reality does not exist, and I don’t even mean an objective one, but an intersubjective one, in which we are all in agreement. And it is easier for these stories of victimization to proliferate, which is the formula for success to justify violence. But it is not a new phenomenon. George Orwell said that he had seen dead people who had not been spoken about, and read about battles that had not taken place. This is typical of conflict situations: distorting reality to justify the violence that some individuals want to use to advance their political agenda.

Q. When you talk about playing the victim, are you referring to conspiracies about replacing white people and theories of that sort?

A. Victimization is the star tool for justifying violence. And it is used. But there are stories of victimization that are true and others that are exaggerated or false. For example, women have traditionally been subordinated to men. It’s true. Now there are men who say they are being victimized by feminism. And when you expose these narrative structures of “they are oppressing us,” it is easier and more justifiable to fight against that oppression.

Q. Is this deliberate exercise of disinformation to undermine all confidence in official sources caused because when you don’t believe anyone, you can believe anything?

A. Of course, everyone is discredited, delegitimized, as a source of information. It is a very good strategy to make a change of power. If we have a status quo, institutions that have been in place for decades, it is the best way to blow up what is there.

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