What Political News Does to Our Brain

Many people spend a ridiculous amount of time consuming political news. But in recent years, and especially this year with its looming elections in the vast majority of Western democracies, this is even more pronounced. And psychological findings about the way the brain processes incoming information can help us understand differences in the way people at different ends of the political spectrum react to and digest news. While a lot has been said about the asymmetry between how critical people on the left and on the right are towards the news sources, my point here is more straightforward but more surprising (and also less controversial).

One big and measurable difference between news-consuming habits on the left and on the right is that people on the left get a significant proportion of their news from (almost exclusively left-wing) late night talk shows, whereas the same is not true of right-wing viewers (amazingly, this was already the case in 2004). Some of these shows are hilarious, in fact, most of them are. Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and now the returning Jon Stewart can really crack you up. But when it comes to political influence, getting your news from late night talks is a bad idea.

To see this, we need to turn to the research on ‘continued influence effect’: the psychological phenomenon that information that we know to be false still stays in our head and influences our reasoning and action.

Here is one of the most famous continued influence effect experiments, conducted in Colleen Seifert’s lab at the University of Michigan in 1994. The experimental setup is the following. First, the experimenter tells you a story. You have no idea what you would have to do with this story. Here is one example: a narrative about a warehouse fire with a lot of details—where the warehouse was, who worked there. At one point the experimenter tells you that cans of oil paint and gas cylinders were stored on the premises. But then she reverses immediately, and tells you that this was not actually true. She explicitly says that there were no oil cans or gas cylinders at all, so they could not have caused the fire.

After being bombarded with all this information, you are asked to perform some tasks completely unrelated to the story for 10 minutes. Then, you have to answer several questions about the warehouse fire. The finding is that in response to, for example, the question about why the fire spread so quickly, people find themselves saying things like, “Oil fires are hard to put out”. But this piece of information about the oil cans had been false. But the vast majority of participants gave answers that used the information about the oil cans and gas cylinders.

Participants knew full well that this information was retracted, but they still used it in their reasoning. The false information about the oil fire is not simply canceled out by the explicit statement that it is false. It remains intact and continues to influence the reasoning process.

Experiments about the continued influence effect, like the one about the warehouse fire, show that once you learn something, it is very difficult to unlearn it, even if some part of your mind knows that it is false—it exerts continued influence. In the warehouse fire experiment, the false information is corrected within seconds, and it still wreaks havoc in our reasoning. But most false information we encounter and absorb throughout our lives isn’t corrected within seconds. So it is even less likely that we can unlearn it.

This takes us back to the news. As the continuing influence effect shows, whatever you watch makes an impact on your mind, even if you know for a fact that what you’re watching is false or just plain lies. And, as these experiments show, once you have a belief, it is very difficult to lose it. So showing left-wing viewers a right-wing politician saying all kinds of crazy things and making fun of it does not have the effect of making the viewer believe that this politician says crazy things. No. It can have the effect of making the viewer (even) more exposed to the ideas (crazy or not) of this right-wing politician. And, as the continuing influence effect shows, being exposed to any ideas, even if they are ridiculous and even if we know them to be false, will, in the future keep influencing our reasoning processes.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great fun to watch some of the late night talk shows. And you can keep up-to-date on what has been going on in politics. But the fact that right-wingers get their news from watching right-wing politicians and left-wingers get their news from watching the same right-wing politicians being made fun of in the late night talk shows means that there is an inherent asymmetry in influencing left-wing voters—both the left and the right hears an onslaught of right-wing political ideas. There are obviously a lot of factors that influence the outcome of any given election, but this asymmetry in watching habits, coupled with the continuing influence effect could have a not-so-insignificant on election outcomes.