In her most recent column in the Washington Post Megan McArdle considers the scientific explanation for Jonathan Swift’s wisecrack “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it” (frequently attributed in various forms to Sam Clemens):
Do lies really spread faster than truth?
Definitely yes, according to a new paper from Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy of MIT’s Media Lab, and Sinan Aral, a professor at the institute’s Sloan School of Management. In fact, these researchers found, “It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people.†You might comfort yourself that lies and the truth must be the proverbial hare and tortoise, with the lies racing out of the starting gate, and the truth eventually catching up, perhaps? Sadly no, at least not on social media: “Falsehood also reached far more people than the truth.â€
Why are lies so much more powerful than the truth? The authors suggest “novelty†may be one answer: Fake news stories offer more of it than does real news. And yet, that seems incomplete. There would, after all, be a certain novelty in learning that former president Barack Obama was aces at mumblety-peg. But that sort of rumor seems unlikely to spread as far or as fast as the suggestion that he was a secret Muslim born in Kenya.
The truth is banal; it is quotidien. It is boring—it is Squire Trelawney to falsehood’s Long John Silver. Few remember the former while the latter is indelible.
The simplest explanation is usually the best. There is a reason the prevailing wisdom is the prevailing wisdom.
