Daniel Freeman Psychologist and author
A dubious milestone was reached at the end of January: the one thousandth fact check of a statement by Donald Trump undertaken by the website Politifact. Trump’s thousandth claim? That the Democrats had “used Covid to cheat” in the 2020 election.
Meanwhile in the UK, the charity Full Fact reported that 50 MPs, including two prime ministers, cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers, declined to correct false, unevidenced or misleading claims in 2022. The statistics regulator had to write to the government at least 10 times to challenge it on its use of statistics or other data.
As election year grinds on in both the US and UK, we can expect much more of this sort of thing. Does it matter? Isn’t playing fast and loose with the facts an inevitable part of politics?
Maybe, but there are signs that we’re facing a widespread crisis of trust. It seems that many of us – understandably – aren’t certain who to believe. Who is telling the truth and who is lying? And in a world of ‘alternative facts’ and 24/7 social media, how do we judge?
If we’re unsure who to trust, we’re more likely to go with our gut feelings. And some of those gut feelings can be pretty alarming. I discovered this first hand in 2020. In the Oxford Coronavirus Explanations, Attitudes, and Narratives Survey (OCEANS), we asked 2,500 adults in England for their views on the Covid-19 pandemic. The extent of conspiracy thinking astonished me.
One in five people, for example, considered it possible that the virus had been created by Jews to destroy the global economy. And almost a quarter endorsed to some degree the proposition that “the vaccine will contain microchips to control people”. Almost 40% thought that lock-down might be an excuse to impose mass surveillance.
On a personal level, paranoid thinking is when we incorrectly view others as deliberately trying to harm us. Habitual mistrust can be stressful and frightening. It warps our sense of the world around us. We see other people primarily as potential threats. We lose the ability to accurately estimate danger.
When I surveyed a representative group of over 10,000 UK adults last year, approximately one in five people were having regular suspicious thoughts, with 5-8% experiencing strong paranoia. For example, 27% said they somewhat or totally believed that someone wanted to hurt them; 27% that there
