Podcast Summary: You Are Not So Smart – Episode 307

Title: Concordance Over Truth Bias
Air date: February 17, 2025
Host: David McRaney
Guests: Samuel Woolley, Katie Joseph, Michael Schwab

Main Theme & Purpose

Episode 307 explores a newly-named cognitive bias: Concordance Over Truth Bias. Through a deep-dive conversation with researchers Samuel Woolley, Katie Joseph, and Michael Schwab, the episode examines how political alignment often trumps factual accuracy in determining whether people believe and share news—sometimes even more powerfully than truth itself.

The episode discusses a major new study showing that people are more likely to believe and share headlines aligned with their beliefs (political concordance), regardless of whether those headlines are true. The guests also dissect what this means for information integrity, media literacy, and why conventional solutions like critical thinking may not be enough.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Problem: Why We Fall for "Fake News"

• Early examples: Referenced the "Literally Unbelievable" website, which chronicled people mistaking Onion satire as real headlines. This exemplifies how digital media, especially social media, lowers critical defenses and spreads misinformation rapidly.

  • [02:01] David McRaney: “Thousands of people shared this article on Facebook believing it was true… expressing how angry they were that this sort of thing was happening in Obama’s America.”

• Selective skepticism: We tend to scrutinize information that opposes our beliefs, but accept confirming info at face value.

  • [05:16] David McRaney: "We selectively apply critical thinking, often accepting without question news stories that confirm our assumptions..."

• Arousal and sharing: Emotional arousal—especially anger or fear—makes us more likely to share information, regardless of accuracy.

  • Study example: People were just as willing to share fake pro- or anti-Trump headlines as real ones, depending on their own political leanings.

• The Illusion of Objectivity:

  • [10:09] Katie Joseph: “The more you consume only one perspective… the more you think that you are more objective because you’re only seeing that one side.”
  • [10:47] Michael Schwab: “The people who… believed they were the most objective and least biased… were the most biased and least objective.”

2. Meet the Researchers & Their Motivations

• Samuel Woolley: Focuses on computational propaganda and how algorithms/bots shape public opinion, particularly in politics.

  • [17:33] Samuel Woolley: "I focus on the purposeful spread of false information… the ways in which propaganda spreads online…”

• Katie Joseph: Interested in how social norms and algorithms shape decision-making, especially via information silos.

  • [18:39] Katie Joseph: “The mechanism through which social norms are manipulated most effectively… is through manipulation of algorithms that shape discourse on the information ecosystem.”

• Michael Schwab: Studies polarization, misinformation, and interventions. Motivated to challenge the idea that fake news belief is only about “cognitive laziness.”

  • [21:42] Michael Schwab: “We ran an exploratory study using the same research paradigm... And in our pilot we found the opposite results, namely that politics did matter a lot for people's beliefs.”

3. Why Study This Now?

• Changes in information landscape: Social media has democratized news production while empowering sophisticated manipulation by vested interests.

  • [23:22] Samuel Woolley: "Social media has actually been co-opted... by powerful political groups and corporate actors... to spread particular messages.”

• Surveillance capitalism & AI manipulation: The infrastructure of attention/data extraction has fueled a fractured, easily manipulated ecosystem—with new generative AI making it worse.

  • [25:54] Katie Joseph: "With generative AI, more of these platforms… are now uniquely persuasive fake accounts… hard to detect… and built on the lie that targeted advertising works.”

• Affective polarization: Political identity now divides society more than race, gender, or other demographic factors.

  • [28:44] Michael Schwab: “…partisanship is now the number one cleavage in terms of what's dividing people…”

4. Study Overview: Methods & Experiment

• Sample: 1,000+ US adults, census-matched, pro- and anti-Trump.

• Procedure:

  • Participants thought it was a memory study; they rated 16 headlines (pro-/anti-Trump, true/fake, and neutral fillers) for perceived truth, likelihood to share, and other factors.
  • Real headlines were independently fact-checked (from Reuters/CNN), and fake headlines ranged from questionably fake to “outlandishly fake.”
  • [33:25] Michael Schwab: “…used a cover story that the study was about recall, it was about memory.”

• Key manipulation: Political alignment (“concordance”) vs. factual accuracy as influences on belief and sharing.

5. Major Findings: Concordance Over Truth Bias

• Political concordance outpaces truth:

  • The political alignment of a headline predicts belief/sharing better than whether the headline is actually true—by roughly double.
  • [42:05] Michael Schwab: “This effect of political concordance was stronger than the effect of headline truth up to kind of around two times the size of the effect.”

• Robust across education and analytical ability: Even highly educated people, or those with strong analytical reasoning, were susceptible; partisanship had a similar effect on both left/right.

  • [47:10] Michael Schwab: “It was robust across low, medium and high education levels… and amongst people who were low in analytical reasoning and people who were high…”

• Key predictor: The "objectivity illusion"—the more people believed they and their side were objective and unbiased, the stronger their actual bias.

  • [47:59] Michael Schwab: “The people who… believed that they were the most objective and least biased… were the most biased and least objective.”

• Resistance to truths: People more readily shared politically concordant fake news than politically discordant truths.

  • [49:49] David McRaney: “Participants were more likely to reject true headlines that seemed discordant… than they were to accept false headlines aligned with their beliefs.”

• Critical thinking not a cure-all: Even high “critical thinkers” (by cognitive reflection test) fell prey to Concordance Over Truth Bias.

  • [52:40] Katie Joseph: “People who have more training… say, okay, I have more evidence to draw from to confirm what I believe. Of course, there’s other studies that show…”

6. Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the “objectivity illusion”:
  • [10:47] Michael Schwab: “The people who… believed they were the most objective… were the most biased and least objective.”
• On the impact of AI and surveillance:
  • [25:54] Katie Joseph: “We've built this master-bound system and now we do see… the technology is also merging now with the nation state in some elements.”
• On resistance to inconvenient truths:
  • [41:07] Samuel Woolley: “…even if a headline is true, and if it doesn’t jive with your… one-sided media diet, [you’re] very unlikely to believe it.”
• On implications for interventions:
  • [56:59] Samuel Woolley: “…the people who think they're the least likely to fall for these kinds of… stuff are actually some of the most likely. Then what does that mean... for how we train people? Does it mean we need to inject a bit of humility into the training?”
• On media and epistemic fragmentation:
  • [28:44] Michael Schwab: "Partisanship is now the number one cleavage in terms of what's dividing people, what's causing animosity..."

7. Big Takeaways & Consequences

• Supply-side solutions (fact-checking fake news) are insufficient.

  • [53:44] Michael Schwab: “It’s not just about focusing on curtailing or fact checking fake news. It’s also… being critical of our own minds.”

• Need for intellectual humility and awareness: Education/interventions should include acceptance of personal susceptibility to bias—not just “more facts” or critical thinking.

  • [57:58] Michael Schwab: “People need to be made aware of the existence of the bias, but… also crucially have to accept that they're vulnerable to the bias. … If you are aware you've got the bias and you accept that you're vulnerable to it, but you're just not motivated to do anything about it, that also might not be enough.”

• Information silos fueled by algorithmic curation intensify epistemic fragmentation.

  • [54:58] Katie Joseph: "The information ecosystem… is designed today… to keep serving you what's congruent with you… so people don't know what they don't know.”

• Practical solution:

  • [64:00] Samuel Woolley: “People have to learn to live with dialectics… it's true that there is corporate media control… but there are also a lot of good journalists out there…”

• Relational, community-based approaches to media literacy may work better than top-down interventions.

  • [66:00] Samuel Woolley: “You’ve got to have members of those communities leading those kinds of initiatives… Because the research shows that oftentimes that backfires in itself, especially amongst conspiracy theorists and hardcore partisans…”

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:01] – "Literally Unbelievable" and early fake news sharing
• [05:16] – Disconfirmation bias, selective skepticism
• [09:21] – The objectivity illusion ("The more you believe you're not going to do this...")
• [23:22–28:44] – Importance of the current information environment: social media, surveillance capitalism, polarization
• [30:58] – Previous vs. current findings: Is truth more important than political concordance?
• [41:07–42:42] – Main findings: Participants resist inconvenient truths over accepting accurate but discordant information
• [47:10–48:52] – Robustness of effect: Education/critical thinking levels and objectivity illusion
• [53:44–57:58] – Interventions, intellectual humility, and future solutions
• [64:00] – Living with dialectics and a pluralistic approach to information

Conclusion: Why This Episode Matters

The episode unpacks a crucial and timely truth: What "feels" politically right often outweighs what is actually true for people across the spectrum, regardless of education or analytical ability. Awareness of the "Concordance Over Truth Bias" challenges accepted wisdom about combating misinformation, pointing instead to the need for humility, community, and systemic change in the way we interact with information.

Actionable insight:

• "It’s not just about being critical of the news, but also being critical of our own minds." – Michael Schwab, [53:44]
• "Having education around understanding that our introspections can be fallible... and it’s good to have intellectual humility." – Michael Schwab, [57:58]

For more on the study and its implications, see the episode’s show notes and referenced research papers.