Dr. Jennifer Jerit on Fake News, Fake Media, and Fake Polls
Episode Summary: It is now a common phrase: fake news. Are you getting tired of it? I wanted to talk to someone who doesn’t have a horse in the race and who has studied media, polling, political polarization, and the psychology of how people think about political media so I can get handle on the Trumpian bon mot that is lasting a lot longer than he did. Dr. Jennifer Jerit is that person, and this is our conversation. Syd Finkelstein Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life. Jennifer Jerit Jennifer Jerit is a Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. She studies American politics with a focus on public opinion and political communication. Her research explores how information (from elected leaders and the media) influences people’s attitudes as well as their knowledge about the political world. She also studies misinformation and techniques for correcting this problem. Several of her current projects examine best practices for the measurement of public opinion through survey and experimental methods. In 2010, Jerit received the Erik Erikson Early Career Award for Excellence and Creativity in the field of Political Psychology and her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council. Professor Jerit has been the recipient of Best Paper awards from the American Political Science Association, International Society of Political Psychology, and International Communication Association. She is on the editorial board of several leading political science journals and a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (3rd edition). Prior to coming to Dartmouth College, Jerit held positions at Stony Brook University, Florida State University, MIT, and University of Connecticut. Insights from this episode:Understanding the psychology of how people process and use political information.The idea that a general concept becomes a partisan issue.How specific motivations can drive behavior in order to influence others.Understanding that algorithms influence exposure to specific resources.How the pandemic is affecting general public health behaviors. Quotes from the show: “There has been, it seems, like a separation between people who study politics and people who practice it. And I’m not quite sure I understand why that’s the case. I do think there are people who get phDs or maybe Master’s in political science and then they go on and work in the political world, so they’ve been trained as political scientists. But I don't think political scientists have had the kind of experience as economists have had.” Jennifer Jerit [28:21] “The content of these two channels is obviously vastly different. It’s challenging to identify the effect of that on people because people are choosing to watch these programs. You know, there’s some element by which there are different people who watch these programs and so they’re different to begin with. They may have different persuasions. They may have different levels of knowledge, different levels of interest. They may differ on other characteristics that we can’t even mention. And so there are different viewers and they are selecting into these channels, most likely. And so that, from a social science standpoint, that’s the biggest challenge: is how to identify or isolate the unique effect from the same person watching Fox versus that same person watching MSNBC.” Jennifer Jerit [30:22] “When the algorithms know what we like, it is logical for those algorithms to suggest more similar things, which takes you deeper and deeper down the same pathway that you’ve been on and it leads to less diversity and variety of perspectives, if you let that happen. And that’s their job. And many people, I mean I was quite happy about these algorithms when Amazon said, “You might like this book.” And I said, “You know what, I think I might.” But when you start to reflect on it, algorithms are a method, a very common method everywhere really now, that leads people to narrower range of use--less exposure to diverse products, ways of thinking, books, records, who knows what.” Syd Finkelstein [34:20] “The real challenge measuring opinion through polls is that the people who agree to participate in a poll are different than the people who don’t. And so even with the very highest quality probability based polls there’s still the choice of whether or not you’re going to participate once you’ve been selected to be a respondent. And so, you know, the conventional way to deal with this is through weighting, where we upweigh the responses of the people who choose to participate among these underrepresented groups. And so I think some of the thought was that that was not being done. There were some mistakes or errors in the way that was done for particular groups, particularly groups related to education in 2016. But weighting, the philosophy of that approach assumes that you know everything about the people who decided to participate; that you can solve this problem through weighting. And I’m just skeptical that that can be done. Because I think there are some differences that maybe we haven’t measured--that we can’t measure. Or maybe there are differences that we don’t even know about.” Jennifer Jerit [45:09] Stay Connected: Syd Finkelstein Website: http://thesydcast.com LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein Twitter: @sydfinkelstein Facebook: The Sydcast Instagram: The Sydcast Jennifer Jerit Website: http://www.jjerit.com Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify. This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.