Composed on 7th of February 2019
When I was reading Why Do People Fall for Fake News? by Gordon Pennycook and David Rand, I was intrigued by their observation on how there are two supposed claims that explain why people perceive news the way they do or rather believe in fake news so comfortably. The first claim supports the idea that people are “hijacked by [their] partisan convictions: that is, [they’re] prone to rationalization”, the other claim suggests that people “often fail to exercise [their] critical faculties: that is, [they’re] mentally lazy”. I believe that these two groups of claims intersect very intrinsically. Our ability to rationalize information is very much influenced by the socio-cultural and socio-political environment we are members of. Being “hijacked” could possibly be synonymous to being “conditioned” into certain behavioral and thought patterns, and accepting fake news so easily without critical question is a reflection of such social conditioning. The ability to exercise “critical faculties” requires a certain type of environment that accepts and adopts self-critical ideologies and practices. Finding such environments might require a level of privilege that is not available or accessible to a large group of people. So my question is, how can individuals employ a critical mindset when the accessibility to critical practices are not as widespread? and if there is access to such criticality, how far does subjectivity go when making judgments of what is fake news and what is not?
