Comparing perception with fact in an aggrieved age

This initiative started by French Imam Chalghoumi and Jewish writer Halter toured Europe in July, 2017. According to one IPSOS Survey, the perception in France is that 31% of the population is Muslim.The true figure is 7.5 %. Paul Zinken/Press Association. All right reserved. Often, one of the gravest threats to an open and
transparent democracy is that political decision-makers act not according to
the reality of the facts, but according to how people interpret that reality.
It might be argued that how people imagine the world has now become more
important than how the world actually is, and that politics is frequently little
better than an exercise in crowd-pleasing.

It is not unusual for these representations of reality
to be shaped in one way or another by the media or by other major opinion-making
outlets, subject to the influence of complex global and local phenomena, and particularly
susceptible to political exploitation. As we are well aware, the most visible
and attention-grabbing news items on the web are not necessarily based on sound
data that has been properly weighed up and assessed, but are often merely those
that happen to be the most widely circulated at a given moment.

Europeans
on migration

The phenomenon is encapsulated in the attitudes of
Europeans to migration and in the way that the upsurge in the number of
refugees has caused instability in many countries. The economic and financial
crisis has engendered a sense of public fear that has been further exacerbated
by Islamist terrorism, leading many to conclude that integration is too
difficult a task. The result has been rising intolerance and new forms of
racism.

An IPSOS survey called "Perils of Perception"
was conducted in 2016 on 30,000 people in 40 countries. Using real data from
official sources such as the World Values Survey and the Pew Research Centre
for purposes of comparison, IPSOS found that public opinion in all the
countries surveyed is prone to serious errors of perception. For example, respondents
in most of the 40 countries covered by the survey tended to overestimate the number
of Muslims present in their country. In France, the perception is that 31% of
the population is Muslim, whereas the true figure is just 7.5%. The same misconceptions
obtain in Italy, Germany, Belgium, the United States, Russia and Sweden.

Web ‘filter bubbles’ are exacerbating public misperceptions.
Search engines guide us towards information that tends to confirm what we
already believe or, at the very least, direct us to websites and information
sources that chime with our own political profile as we have indelibly delineated
it on the web.

Researchers therefore need not only to produce more
evidence-based facts, but also to present effective comparisons between
perceptions and actual data. Facts and figures can and should serve to
highlight the gap between popular opinion and reality.

Exposing
disinformation

The advantages rather than just the disadvantages (in
this case of immigration) need to be set out clearly, and a distinction drawn
between the short-, medium- and long-term effects of any given phenomenon. While,
for example, the arrival of immigrants may well lead to "competition"
in the short term for welfare benefits, in the medium and long term,
immigration is of vital demographic and economic importance for Europe.

A true representation of the "collateral
effects" of economic and social decisions is also called for. For the
purposes of research and communication, public debate should always be framed in
a way that requires participants to make full disclosure of where they acquired
their information, so that unreliable sources are not accorded the same
credence as trustworthy ones. Web users could be involved in the work of
identifying misleading websites and sources of disinformation, and every effort
should be made to ensure direct access to sources.

Major web platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube
and Twitter are putting some safeguards in place, but the efficacy of their
efforts has yet to be verified. Several newspapers have made tools for assessing
the credibility of internet sites available to their readership, such as the Decodex system provided by Le Monde.

Meanwhile, journalists and human rights organisations
are working hard at developing fact-checking mechanisms that are capable of
spotting bogus items, such as manipulated photos and videos disseminated on the
internet with the deliberate intention of swaying public opinion (Amnesty International).

Several initiatives, some of which will be unveiled at
the World Forum for Democracy, aim to improve media literacy, tackle the
problem of disinformation and restore the credibility of the media. Some
instruments improve the accuracy of web searches by facilitating comparisons between
different sources and evaluating their respective credibility. Others create
personalised algorithms that enable users to track their sources of
information.

Conspiratorial
mindsets

Even so, algorithms alone will not resolve the problem
entirely, because people tend to filter information according to what they
already think (the “echo-chamber effect”).
A person who has been duped by false information will often have deliberately
chosen to be misled because they find the truth less comforting or too complex,
or else regard it as nothing other than the expression of an "enemy"
ideology. People prefer the seeming speed and efficacy of ideological shortcuts
or, simply, are too mentally lazy to do otherwise, because fact checking
requires the expenditure of time and effort. Paradoxically, the vast amount of
information at our fingertips makes it all the easier to adduce
"proofs" of false beliefs.

If decision-makers were to engage in serious
discussion with researchers and the independent media, they might be more
inclined to take account of "uncomfortable" facts and rely less on data
that merely confirm their pre-existing political views. In the meantime, the
ceaseless hunting for the latest journalistic scoop and the high incidence of aggressive
anti-political attacks, which are especially common on social media, serve only
to discredit politicians indiscriminately and stoke popular scepticism and
cynicism.

Unfortunately, many populist politicians have a vested
interest in exploiting the misperceptions of the public. It is therefore not
enough to refer people to clear and scientifically proven evidence. Rather, we
first need to overcome the distrust of those at whom the information is targeted.
The loss of faith in the traditional media is proceeding apace with an
increasing tendency to lend credence to conspiracy theories, according to which
the "truth" is always concealed from "the people" by
presumptive "hidden powers".

At a time of loss of faith in the media and, more
generally, in all institutions, news that is entirely fake, tendentious or
simply inaccurate spreads easily. Gerald Bronner has shown how what he calls
the "revolution of the cognitive market" is favouring the spread of a
conspiracy mindset, increasing the speed with which conspiracy theories are
taken up on the internet and perpetuating myths. Political populists exploit
the sense of grievance of people who feel they are forever being duped by
"hidden powers", and cater to their prejudices without ever forcing
them to face up to the need for "uncomfortable" decisions.

Serious
nuanced debate

To believe that the solution lies in merely increasing
the availability of knowledge is a tempting but misleading way of Enlightenment
thinking. Rather, we need to use all the means at our disposal to promote serious
debate that grapples with issues rather than simply exciting uninformed
speculation around them, that advocates critical and divergent thinking, that
inspires discernment and discrimination in the interpretation of information, and
that encourages the correct use of sources.