What We’re Reading

Here are snippets of the news, research, or articles that have caught our eye over the past few weeks. 

(Inclusion here doesn’t mean we endorse it, unless we specifically say so!)

Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy — Francesca Tripodi

Google’s latest desire to answer our questions for us, rather than requiring us to click on the returns and find the answers for ourselves, is not particularly problematic if what you’re seeking is a straightforward fact like how many ounces make up a gallon. The problem is, many rely on search engines to seek out information about more convoluted topics. And, as my research reveals, this shift can lead to incorrect returns that often disrupt democratic participation, confirm unsubstantiated claims, and are easily manipulatable by people looking to spread falsehoods.

For example, if one queried “When is the North Dakota caucus” during the 2020 presidential election, Google highlighted the wrong information, stating that it was on Saturday, March 28, 2020. In fact, the firehouse caucus took place on March 10, 2020—it was the Republican convention that took place on the 28th. Worse yet, when errors like this happen, there is no mechanism whereby users who notice discrepancies can flag it for informational review.

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The trouble is, many users still rely on Google to fact-check information, and doing so might strengthen their belief in false claims. This is not only because Google sometimes delivers misleading or incorrect information, but also because people I spoke with for my research believed that Google’s top search returns were “more important,” “more relevant,” and “more accurate,” and they trusted Google more than the news—they considered it to be a more objective source. Many said the Knowledge Graph might be the only source they consult, but few realized how much Google has changed—that it is not the search engine it once was. In an effort to “do their own research,” people tend to search for something they saw on Facebook or other social media platforms, but because of the way content has been tagged and categorized, they are actually falling into an information trap .

This leads to what I refer to in my book, The Propagandists' Playbook, as the “IKEA effect of misinformation.” Business scholars have found that when consumers build their own merchandise, they value the product more than an already assembled item of similar quality—they feel more competent and therefore happier with their purchase. Conspiracy theorists and propagandists are drawing on the same strategy, providing a tangible, do-it-yourself quality to the information they provide. Independently conducting a search on a given topic makes audiences feel like they are engaging in an act of self-discovery when they are actually participating in a scavenger-hunt engineered by those spreading the lies.

Time to outgrow social media — Ryan Avent

You would think, in our era, that people would be quite comfortable with the idea that technologies which are valued by many people can also generate large social costs, such that we need to work, collectively, to use them less and/or more sensibly. That is the story of our fossil-fuel technologies, which provide us with a high-standard of living but which also contribute to public-health problems and climate change.

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Social media is in many respects a comparable problem. Lots of people seem to value it; certainly lots of people use it a lot of the time. But it generates large social costs, and we need to work collectively to use it less and/or better. And while there will inevitably be people who reject this assessment, it should be the case that most of us feel an ethical responsibility to moderate our use, for the sake of others.

And yet this is not a particularly popular way to talk about social media, and there is not anything like a consensus across elite opinion-makers that social media causes broad public harms which need to be addressed through collective action. 

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Why don’t they? One possible answer is that they’re not convinced that social media is bad. There is a massive effort underway to document social media’s effects, much of which is described in a public file maintained by Jonathan Haidt and Chris Bail. But poring over the results, it is hard to find any smoking gun which has the power of the cumulative work demonstrating the powerful link between carbon emissions and global warming. But this does not excuse us from taking an appropriately critical view of social media, for a couple of reasons. 

First, the ills that social media researchers often study are not necessarily the most worrying—and the most worrying ills are not the sort that are easy to grapple with in quantitative social-science research. A lot of research questions address things like echo chambers and the way they contribute to radicalization, or focus on the prevalence and effect of misinformation.

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But as I discuss here, this way of studying social media misunderstands what is most dangerous about it. The problem is not so much that people are being exposed to bad information and are thus changing their views on particular issues in destabilizing ways. It is, rather, that social media dramatically changes the way we interact with each other, alters our perception of prevailing norms and values, and thus plays havoc with our capacity to cohere and reason as a society. Because social media disrupts our collective capacity to process information and make judgments, studies of how individuals are affected inevitably fail to capture the problems of greatest concern. 

Eight Weeks of Therapy, Plus Some Cash, Can Change the Lives of Violent Men - Christopher Blattman

Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is a set of simple techniques for recognizing your problematic, “automatic” behaviors and training yourself to act differently. For instance, when an emotion like anger swells, CBT helps you recognize how it can distort your thinking. You can practice habits that put your rational brain back in charge, such as slow breathing, counting to 10 or walking away.

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In 2009, my colleagues and I, working with a program called Sustainable Transformation of Youth in Liberia, decided to explore, using a randomized trial, how much difference CBT could make for men deeply immersed in crime and daily violence.

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We looked at effects one month after the program, then one year later and, just recently, after 10 years. In an earlier paper, we showed that therapy plus cash had promising results after a year. Other research on CBT and violence prevention suggests that therapy’s effects fall off after that, and Liberia was no different — the effects of therapy alone began to fade with the first year.

We expected therapy plus cash to suffer the same fate over time (as did most of the experts we surveyed). But a decade later, after we tracked down and interviewed as many of men from the original study as we could find (some 830, 93 percent of those still alive), we learned that the large effects in the therapy-plus-cash group were sustained.

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Beyond the large and persistent impacts of therapy and economic assistance, our results offer other good news. Even among the control group, half returned to more mainstream, nonviolent lives within a year. This suggests that even the young Liberian men who seem most lost revert to the mean over time. We also found that STYL’s impacts on crime and violence were concentrated among the men who reported, at the outset, the most anti-social behavior. This suggests that cities can make meaningful progress on violence with targeted interventions for the small number of the most at-risk people.

Doctrine For Diplomacy: To Remain Relevant, The U.S. State Department Needs A New Statecraft — Dan Spokojny

The State Department has not developed any standard operating procedure for successfully managing peace processes. Indeed, it has no clear methods and procedures for the conduct of diplomacy. Whether the United States is supporting a democratic election, combatting terrorism, or advancing human rights, diplomats are expected to figure things out for themselves.

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As the scholar Dan Reiter noted, “Like good carpenters, foreign-policymakers need to know their tools.” Whether drafting peace agreements, building a sanctions program, countering human rights violations, or supporting a democratic election, policymakers should have access to a set of evidence-based best practices. No two foreign policy situations are the same, but oft-repeated foreign policy challenges and opportunities are common enough to make the identification of best practices feasible.

To this end, the State Department should ask its diplomats to feed their experiences into U.S. diplomacy’s larger body of work to constantly improve and update American statecraft. The most experienced and innovative experts in diplomacy should be encouraged to study and innovate U.S. diplomatic doctrine.

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Making doctrine official invites study, evaluation, debate, testing, and continual improvement. It enables learning and provides a sturdier platform for Congress and the American people to hold U.S. foreign policy accountable for achieving its stated goals. Doctrine communicates what the State Department expects of its recruits, what must be trained, and what is necessary for promotion and leadership.

Organizations that lack a shared understanding of how to achieve success are bound to underperform. In such a setting, “Managers have a strong incentive to worry more about constraints than tasks, which means to worry more about processes than outcomes,” explains Hugh Heclo, the influential scholar of organizational management. This describes the State Department well, where officials often stay busy writing cables and delivering talking points for policies everyone knows will fail.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash