Scientists aren’t typically salespeople. So in addition to question prep, Prentice says much of the training looks like standard customer service: “How do you build rapport with a customer? How do you just pause your own thoughts for a minute and really try to get into the mind of that person and think about how you could sort of chip away at their understanding?”
Chipping away is all you can do in personal conversations, too. If people in your life are always spouting off misinformation, meet them where they are, Prentice says. Start asking questions and get them talking about what they know about the world, and how they’ve come to know it. “If you’re too forceful, and you’re not having a conversation with the person, you’re only going to do more harm than good.”
But while misinformation spread around the dining room table can ruin Thanksgiving, misinformation spread by authority figures can ruin lives.
“It’s really important to recognize that, in terms of practical consequences, misinformation is killing people.” For decades, University of Alberta Professor of Health Law and Science Policy Timothy Caulfield has studied and written books on the effects of scientific misinformation, and receives regular hate mail and death threats for doing so. But in recent years, his research has shown a “huge uptick” in health and science misinformation for at least two reasons.
One is the sheer mass of misinformation available to most humans for the first time in history, and the social-media companies that happily spread it for revenue. The other reason might be as old as society itself.
In a 2017 interview on his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, European historian Timothy Snyder said that what “we’re dealing with now about the alternative facts and post-factuality is pretty familiar to the 1920s. It’s a vision that’s very similar to the central premise of the fascist vision.”
Caulfield agrees. “The goal of the misinformation mongers, as I call them, is to create distrust in institutions. There have been many studies showing how state actors like Russia — their goal is to create distrust in our health, scientific and democratic institutions, because that creates chaos, division, and polarization,” Caulfield says, adding that he thinks it’s only going to get worse, because it’s become ideological. “Look at jurisdictions like Florida, where they’re passing laws to outlaw masks or calling to outlaw vaccine mandates. Misinformation has become an official part of the party platform. And we’re starting to see that here, too.”