Professor of Philosophy Sharon Ryan (SR) believes we should all be humble, careful and moderately skeptical, but not full-blown skeptics. She distinguishes three levels of skepticism: intellectual humility (an intellectual virtue that involves acknowledging one's cognitive limitations); moderate skepticism (admitting that we don't know much about the most controversial and complex issues); and radical, defeatist skepticism that abandons all hope for understanding (such as calling all mainstream media “fake news”). She endorses intellectual humility, embraces a moderate form of skepticism and believes both are essential to a thriving democracy and required for wisdom.
Ryan sat down with Associate Professor of Communication Studies Elizabeth Cohen (EC), who has expertise in the way social media is used to share news. In a recent conversation, they discussed this skepticism, why we need a highly educated populace for our democracy to thrive and how the Eberly College is preparing students to do just that.
SR: It seems like we are living in a moment in history now where people are extremely skeptical about politicians, the media and people who disagree with them.
EC: From my vantage point, skepticism that people have toward the media, and actually all of our institutions, isn’t really a new phenomenon. If you look at some of the research on this, people have been becoming more skeptical about their government and media institutions for well over 30 years now. It’s been this downhill trend. I think there’s a lot of things that have accelerated it recently: political rhetoric being one, our own politicians calling into question their own institutions. But I do think that our media environment has something to do with it, too. Up until the past 15 years, we had pretty solid gatekeepers in the media. We had people, for better or worse, who were making decisions about what gets into the news and what doesn’t get into the news. Social media, again for better or worse, took that away, and it’s harder to tell what a “mainstream news source” is – as much as people like to use that term – and what types of news we should be using. So, I think that has also contributed to this greater climate of skepticism. What do you think?
SR: Yeah, I agree, and I think that the influence of social media, as you pointed out, has positive and negative implications. One of the positives is that people get to say what they think and people who are on the margins, or at least not in the mainstream, get to share a point of view. And I think that there’s something really important about being able to do that, but I think it brings with it a need for people to be able to assess information and evaluate evidence very carefully, and I don’t think we all are equipped with those skills. I think people are skeptical because you can hear one point of view and someone else in the position of authority saying it’s false, or that it’s fake news or that it didn’t even really happen. So, from my point of view, I can really understand and am somewhat sympathetic to a skeptical outlook for a regular person just trying to go out into the world and understand what’s really going on. I can really appreciate how someone can look at all the information out there and there’s so much of it. So, even if you really try to be very diligent about looking around and seeing what’s going on in the world, you couldn’t even get through the day if you really read all of the interesting, pertinent information out there. You have to cut back on what you’re going to listen to or read. I think that skepticism is almost inevitable, but I would like to say that, in some sense, it’s very healthy, and I think that questioning is very important. What’s interesting is where we go from that questioning.
EC: First of all, I want to say that I really like that you aren’t so negative about social media because I feel like when we talk about the culture we live in right now, social media gets a lot of blame. And maybe some of it is placed well there: your point about being sympathetic to the fact that people need a place to express their voices, and this isn’t all bad. I’ve been reading a lot of things recently about how “expertise” doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Whether it’s expertise about gatekeepers and journalists or “oh, the editor knows what’s best for us” or “the doctor knows what’s best for us” or “the professor knows what’s best for us.” What has happened, for instance, is when mothers didn’t feel like they were being listened to by their doctors, they were able to go online and create their own forums to help each other out, voice their own opinions and figure out problems on their own. And of course, there’s two sides to that. There are people who might not necessarily be educated in things like vaccine science having these conversations, but I think that some of what we’ve seen is a response to a larger problem.
There are groups that have been condescending and not clear in their communication, and now that the public has the ability to go and find out information on their own, they’re doing it. And I think there’s something still magnificent about it. Thinking just about the news, before social media, the New York Times was the one that reported that there were weapons of mass destruction, and that was not true. I think the New York Times is a credible piece of journalism, and the journalists there do an excellent job, but nothing’s perfect. This type of stuff was happening long before we had social media and skepticism was important then and it’s important now. You also mentioned the information overload. There’s so much out there, and the question is, do we have to be skeptical about everything or is there some safe space where we don’t have to question things?
SR: I like your idea of bringing up expertise. There’s a whole literature that’s grown up in philosophy about epistemic injustice. One thing is that you don’t listen to someone or you don’t take them as a source of knowledge because you have some sort of bias against them. The mere fact of epistemic injustice does make us question what is the true story. If we’re only getting information from a certain group of people and discriminating, not listening to and not giving credibility or expertise to people who actually have it, that’s a serious problem. But on the other hand, and I think we agree on this, there are experts, there are people who are educated, and we should be referring to them. I think a certain kind of epistemic humility begs me – when I’m trying to think about, say public policies having to do with science, medicine and technology, even though I’m not in those fields – to listen to what leading scientists are saying and realizing these are the experts, and I’m going to listen to them.
“I think that skepticism is almost inevitable, but I would like to say that, in some sense, it’s very healthy, and I think that questioning is very important.”
— Sharon Ryan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy
EC: So, where do we get that now? You have it, but maybe not everybody does anymore.
SR: How do we get expertise?
EC: Yeah. How do we get back that respect for other people’s knowledge in realms that we don’t have?
SR: I think part of the problem is an inference people make that just because a credible source of information makes one mistake, even if it’s a big mistake, that doesn’t diminish them as being not credible at all or not an expert at all.
EC: I’ll ask my students why they don’t like a source, and they’ll say because it’s biased, and I’ll say, what isn’t biased? If it’s created by a human, it’s got some sort of bias on it. I think your job as a consumer is to recognize what the bias is and then figure out what you’re going to do with it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean stamping it out.
SR: Yeah, you can’t just outright dismiss someone who’s got an interesting view or has studied information and done their homework. They might not have the right answer but they’re certainly someone worth listening to and listening to very carefully. And I think that’s part of what’s so valuable about a liberal arts education. In the Eberly College, that’s what we do. We teach people how to read, to write, to think, to assess evidence, to look for new evidence, to know where to look for new evidence, and to ask the right questions.
EC: And to be exposed to fields where, even if they don’t want to go into that field themselves, they learn to appreciate an expertise in a different realm.
SR: Right. I think, to just have some kind of radical skepticism where you say this person made a mistake, or I don’t know exactly what to believe here. Not to just dismiss all the evidence and say I’m just going to be a dogmatist and believe whatever I want to believe or believe what my party says or believe what my leader tells me is true. You have to keep your critical thinking skills and constantly be improving upon them. And where you lack skills you need to admit that to yourself and go to people and listen to people who have the expertise you lack. I think it’s good to be cautious. It’s good to use your critical thinking skills.
EC: Anecdotally speaking, I think that we are living in a time where people are being very strongly guided by their emotions, and specifically emotions that are tied to specific groups. We have always had fake news, for instance. We’ve had it on the racks of the tabloids and grocery tabloids all the time. But the difference is people kind of understood what tabloids were. People knew what to do with it. But now, the lines are blurred. Real news looks kind of like fake news, and real news will sometimes have misinformation. It’s more confusing, but I think what makes it worse is that a lot of people who manufacture this type of information, whether they’re doing it for profit or doing it for political reasons, know that the most successful types of misinformation are the things that divide us and the things that make us angry.
I think all the things you’re talking about are exactly what we need, but as I’m hearing you talk, I’m thinking that it’s so hard to get people to stop and think critically about things when things have made them mad, or they feel fear, or they feel like people are coming out to get them, or they feel like 50 percent of our country are lunatics or want to come and get them or take things away from them. And I think a lot of people in our country feel that way right now. And I think that the reason for that is – the reason they take information critically all the time – is because some of that information is actually designed to disrupt them emotionally.
There is actually research on something called hostile media bias, which basically says that partisans on both sides of an issue can read the exact same news article, and even if this news article has been determined to be as objective as possible by some neutral party, both people will see it as being biased against their side. Not just as biased but as, “it’s hostile toward me.” That causes a lot of problems because then they’ll just dismiss it without giving it any sort of consideration.
“I’ll ask my students why they don’t like a source, and they’ll say because it’s biased, and I’ll say, what isn’t biased?”
— Elizabeth Cohen, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies
SR: Or, also like when you read something and think, “this is already what I thought,” so you don’t even really read it.
EC: Confirmation bias.
SR: Yeah, and then you share it. To me, an interesting question is, what does a share mean? Should we believe that if I share something to you that I’m thereby endorsing it as being accurate?
EC: But, I think that’s what happens. That’s something new, right? We talked about gatekeepers. Before, we had people deciding what news shows up at our front door every morning. Now, the people sharing our news are the people in our social network. We’ve already assigned them with varying levels of credibility in our head. And then some people, whether or not they deserve it or not, we think of as being very credible no matter what they share. Getting back to my point about emotions, everything on these platforms happens in such a knee-jerk fashion. They’re doing that because maybe the headline resonated with them. Another piece of advice I give my students is if you read something and it makes you feel angry, that should be a trigger to stop and ask yourself why it makes you feel angry instead of pushing the trigger. Because like I said, I really believe that a lot of the stuff – and I don’t think that it’s all politically motivated; I don’t think it’s conspiracy all the time – the way the economy works on social media is to get people to click on things and to get them to share things. And the things that we’re more likely to do that with are these knee-jerk reactions that hit us in the gut. So, if you feel like you got a sucker punch to the gut when you read something, I guess that’s the first sign to slow down. Don’t share it; just think about it. Think about why it was written. Read it. But that’s just the first step to slow down and become more skeptical. Just slow down so you can dissect it more.
SR: Yeah or just be a critical thinker and read it and think about it for yourself ...
EC: I think that’s so hard for people. You’re going through your newsfeed and you’ve got a gazillion things coming at you at once. You can’t be critical about everything so how do we ...
SR: Okay, then just admit that and say, “This was in my newsfeed. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if it’s false.” So, to admit that this is something that I can’t really say is true or false. So, I think just rein it in.
EC: That humility is definitely an ingredient that’s missing.
SR: Right, and those are the skills that we teach in our College and in our departments for sure. I just think to have a thriving democracy, we need a very highly educated populace. And we need to teach people basic skills that you really get in a college of arts and sciences.
EC: I wish we got it earlier. Of course, I’m biased because I’m a media person, but most of my students don’t get classes on media literacy before they get to college, and even here it’s optional. Our high school curriculum, it’s a busy place I get that, but I do think it’s funny that the things we’re concerned about our children consuming all the time – you hear all these alarmist news reports about how much time kids spend online and everything – the answer is they’re not going to stop doing it. We just need to teach them how to do it. The answer isn’t for students to not use Wikipedia, for instance. Why don’t we show them how to use it? How to use it well, how to use it critically, maybe even control some of the content instead of passively taking it in. I don’t see those types of things happening. I agree with you that that type of education would help us, and I don’t even think it would have to be at the college level, [but] I think that’s where people get it.