Emotion Doesn’t Know the Truth, But It Knows What You Care About

Emotion Doesn’t Know the Truth, But It Knows What You Care About

You see something online, and it’s shocking. Or enraging. Or heartwarming. Or enlightening, or surprising, or hilarious. Uh-oh, say cognitive scientists, the world’s biggest party poopers. Slow down. You may be about to make a mistake.1

And they aren’t wrong. That’s our advice too. That’s the stop in SIFT. When something triggers one of the above feelings, when it is compelling, people tend to skip past those quick checks they should do before engaging with it or sharing it. We sometimes feel like we’ve just heard the juiciest rumor, and if we don’t share it now, we will die. And it’s tempting to think of the emotion here as just being purely downside, distorting our view of what is true, what is real, what is logical. If we could remove the feelings, problem solved, right?

Here’s the thing: we’ve found when people try to gauge the accuracy of news that elicits no feeling, they often struggle more.

How is that possible? Let’s imagine you hear a fact about a sport you know well. Glancing at your phone during what seems the world’s longest lecture, you see that in a current championship soccer game, a new player, only with the club for seventeen months, scored a goal from half field with twenty minutes left in the game.

If you know soccer, and you like soccer, you’re going to have a lot of feelings about this, trust me. But you’re busy at work or school, and you don’t want to share false information, so you text your trusty roommate, who couldn’t care less about soccer, and ask, “Is this true?” A few minutes later, you get a text back: “Sadly, no.” So, you skip the repost and go back to listening to the lecture. But, as you head home, you pass a bar and see . . . a replay of the most perfectly executed half-field shot you’ve ever seen, planted upper left corner, as if guided by God herself.

You get home and confront your roommate: Why did you say it wasn’t true? Oh, your roommate replies, the player did plant it from half field. But he had been with the club two years, not seventeen months, and there were actually twenty-five minutes left in the game, not twenty. So really, 33 percent true, at best.

Sure, this is a contrived, low-stakes example. But we see the same sorts of differences in interpretation in more important matters. So, what’s going on here?

On one hand, we could chalk up the misunderstanding to a difference in conscious process. You’ve seen a lot of games, you know half-field goals sometimes happen but are statistically rare, whereas a goal with twenty or twenty-five minutes to go is exceedingly common. The important part of the story you heard was obviously the length of the shot. You didn’t need to sit there with a list of soccer statistics to figure out which aspects of the story were probable. You knew this the moment you heard it—before you gave it a moment’s thought. You knew because the idea of a half-field shot was compelling. It got you to say, “No way! I’ve got to check this out.” It engaged you. It sparked a feeling.