Brian Southwell looks at how human brains verify information and discusses some of the challenges of battling widespread falsehoods

Brian Southwell关注于人类大脑如何验证信息，并探讨了在与广泛传播的谎言作斗争时所面临的一些挑战。

Misinformation – both deliberately promoted and accidentally shared – is perhaps an inevitable part of the world in which we live, but it is not a new problem. People likely have lied to one another for roughly as long as verbal communication has existed. Deceiving others can offer an apparent opportunity to gain strategic advantage, to motivate others to action, or even to protect interpersonal bonds. Moreover, people inadvertently have been sharing inaccurate information with one another for thousands of years.

错误信息——无论是有意传播的还是无意传播的——也许是我们生活的世界不可避免的一部分，但它并不是一个新问题。自从语言交流出现以来，人们就可能互相说谎。欺骗他人可以提供一个明显的机会来获得战略优势，激励他人采取行动，甚至保护人际关系。此外，数千年来，人们一直在不经意间相互分享不准确的信息。

However, we currently live in an era in which technology enables information to reach large audiences distributed across the globe, and thus the potential for immediate and widespread effects from misinformation now looms larger than in the past. Yet the means to correct misinformation might, over time, be found in those same patterns of mass communication and of the facilitated spread of information.

然而，我们目前生活在一个技术使信息能够到达分布在全球各地的大量受众的时代，因此，错误信息产生直接和广泛影响的可能性现在比过去更大。然而，随着时间的推移，纠正错误信息的手段可能会在这些大众传播和促进信息传播的相同模式中找到。

The main worry regarding misinformation is its potential to unduly influence attitudes and behavior, leading people to think and act differently than they would if they were correctly informed, as suggested by the research teams of Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol and Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University, among others. In other words, we worry that misinformation might lead people to hold misperceptions (or false beliefs) and that these misperceptions,especially when they occur among large groups of people, may have detrimental, downstream consequences for health, social harmony, and the political climate.

布里斯托尔大学的斯蒂芬·莱万多夫斯基和杜克大学的伊丽莎白·马什等人的研究小组认为，对错误信息的主要担忧是它可能会过度影响人们的态度和行为，导致人们的思考和行为与他们在得到正确信息时不同。换句话说，我们担心错误的信息可能会导致人们持有误解(或错误的信念)，而这些误解，特别是当它们发生在一大群人中时，可能会对健康、社会和谐和政治气候产生有害的下游后果。

At least three observations related to misinformation in the contemporary mass-media environment warrant the attention of researchers, policymakers, and really everyone who watches television, listens to the radio, or reads information online. First of all, people who encounter misinformation tend to believe it, at least initially. Secondly, electronic and print media often do not block many types of misinformation before it appears in content available to large audiences. Thirdly, countering misinformation once it has enjoyed wide exposure can be a resource-intensive effort.

至少有三个与当代大众媒体环境中的错误信息有关的观察值得研究人员、政策制定者以及实际上每个看电视、听广播或在网上阅读信息的人的注意。首先，遇到错误信息的人倾向于相信它，至少一开始是这样。其次，电子和印刷媒体往往不能阻止许多类型的错误信息在出现在大量受众可以获得的内容之前。第三，一旦错误信息被广泛曝光，打击它可能是一项资源密集型的工作。

Knowing what happens when people initially encounter misinformation holds tremendous importance for estimating the potential for subsequent problems. Although it is fairly routine for individuals to come across information that is false, the question of exactly how – and when – we mentally label information as true or false has garnered philosophical debate. The dilemma is neatly summarized by a contrast between how the 17th-century philosophers René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza described human information engagement, with conflicting predictions that only recently have been empirically tested in robust ways. Descartes argued that a person only accepts or rejects information after considering its truth or falsehood; Spinoza argued that people accept all encountered information (or misinformation) by default and then subsequently verify or reject it through a separate cognitive process. In recent decades, empirical evidence from the research teams of ErikAsp of the University of Chicago and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University, among others, has supported Spinoza's account: people appear to encode all new information as if it were true, even if only momentarily, and later tag the information as being either true or false, a pattern that seems consistent with the observation that mental resources for skepticism physically reside in a different part of the brain than the resources used in perceiving and encoding.

了解人们最初遇到错误信息时会发生什么，对于估计后续问题的可能性非常重要。尽管个人遇到虚假信息是相当常见的，但我们究竟如何以及何时在心理上将信息标记为真实或虚假的问题已经引起了哲学上的争论。17世纪哲学家笛卡尔(ren Descartes)和斯宾诺莎(Baruch Spinoza)对人类信息参与的描述截然不同，他们的预测相互矛盾，直到最近才得到有力的实证检验。笛卡尔认为，一个人只有在考虑了信息的真伪之后才会接受或拒绝它;斯宾诺莎认为，人们默认接受所有遇到的信息(或错误信息)，然后通过一个单独的认知过程验证或拒绝它。近几十年来，芝加哥大学的ErikAsp和哈佛大学的Daniel Gilbert等研究团队的经验证据支持了斯宾诺莎的说法:人们似乎把所有的新信息都当作是真的来编码，即使只是暂时的，然后把这些信息标记为对或错，这种模式似乎与观察一致，即怀疑的精神资源在物理上驻留在大脑的不同部分，而不是用于感知和编码的资源。

What about our second observation that misinformation often can appear in electronic or print media without being preemptively blocked? In support of this, one might consider the nature of regulatory structures in the United States: regulatory agencies here tend to focus on post hoc detection of broadcast information. Organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) offer considerable monitoring and notification functions, but these roles typically do not involve preemptive censoring. The FDA oversees direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising, for example, and has developed mechanisms such as the 'Bad Ad' program, through which people can report advertising in apparent violation of FDA guidelines on drug risks. Such programs, although laudable and useful, do not keep false advertising off the airwaves. In addition, even misinformation that is successfully corrected can continue to affect attitudes.

我们的第二个观察结果是，错误信息经常出现在电子或印刷媒体上，而没有被先发制人地阻止。为了支持这一点，人们可以考虑美国监管结构的性质:这里的监管机构往往侧重于对广播信息的事后检测。像食品和药物管理局(FDA)这样的组织提供了相当大的监督和通知功能，但这些角色通常不涉及先发制人的审查。例如，FDA监管直接面向消费者的处方药广告，并制定了“不良广告”计划等机制，人们可以通过该计划举报明显违反FDA药品风险指导方针的广告。这样的节目虽然值得称赞和有用，但并不能阻止电视广播中的虚假广告。此外，即使错误信息被成功纠正，也会继续影响人们的态度。

This leads us to our third observation: a campaign to correct misinformation, even if rhetorically compelling, requires resources and planning to accomplish necessary reach and frequency. For corrective campaigns to be persuasive, audiences need to be able to comprehend them, which requires either effort to frame messages in ways that are accessible or effort to educate and sensitize audiences to the possibility of misinformation. That some audiences might be unaware of the potential for misinformation also suggests the utility of media literacy efforts as early as elementary school. Even with journalists and scholars pointing to the phenomenon of 'fake news', people do not distinguish between demonstrably false stories and those based in fact when scanning and processing written information.

这就引出了我们的第三个观察:纠正错误信息的运动，即使在修辞上引人注目，也需要资源和计划来实现必要的覆盖面和频率。为了使纠正运动具有说服力，受众需要能够理解它们，这需要努力以易于理解的方式构建信息，或者努力教育和敏感受众对错误信息的可能性。一些受众可能没有意识到错误信息的可能性，这也表明，早在小学时代，媒体素养的努力就已经发挥了作用。即使记者和学者指出了“假新闻”现象，人们在扫描和处理书面信息时也无法区分明显虚假的故事和基于事实的故事。

We live at a time when widespread misinformation is common. Yet at this time many people also are passionately developing potential solutions and remedies. The journey forward undoubtedly will be a long and arduous one. Future remedies will require not only continued theoretical consideration but also the development and maintenance of consistent monitoring tools – and a recognition among fellow members of society that claims which find prominence in the media that are insufficiently based in scientific consensus and social reality should be countered. Misinformation arises as a result of human fallibility and human information needs. To overcome the worst effects of the phenomenon, we will need coordinated efforts over time, rather than any singular one-time panacea we could hope to offer.

我们生活在一个普遍存在错误信息的时代。然而，在这个时候，许多人也在热情地开发潜在的解决方案和补救措施。前进的道路无疑是漫长而艰苦的。今后的补救措施不仅需要继续从理论上进行考虑，而且需要发展和维持一致的监测工具，社会其他成员也要认识到，应当抵制那些在媒体上引人注目的、缺乏科学共识和社会现实依据的主张。错误信息的产生是人类易犯错误和人类信息需求的结果。为了克服这一现象的最坏影响，我们需要长期的协调努力，而不是我们希望提供的任何单一的一次性灵丹妙药。