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<\/p>\nby Jim Mathews \/ President & CEO<\/p>\n
We all have things we deeply, desperately want to be true. But in a world in which the unscrupulous, the deceptive, or simply the na\u00efve have access to AI-driven creation tools, the risks that come from passing along things that just feel so right…can be pretty wrong.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, there\u2019s a lot of that going on in passenger rail. I can\u2019t tell you how many times in a typical week I get an email from a donor or supporter letting me know about some really fantastic development that I really should say something about.<\/p>\n
Trouble is, 99.99 percent of the time, it just ain\u2019t so.<\/p>\n
One came to me last week breathlessly claiming that Amtrak was already running a new train called the Mountaineer ( ! ) extending Gulf Coast service (currently between New Orlans and Mobile) to Jacksonville, along with a second daily Crescent between New York City and New Orleans.<\/p>\n
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Sheer, utter, compleat nonsense. How many of you have ridden this \u201cMountaineer\u201d to Jacksonville yet? Anyone? It launched last year, supposedly, so somebody must have. Or, I\u2019ll wait here while you go search Amtrak.com to book on one of the two (alleged) daily Crescents. C\u2019mon, gang. It was reposted by MSN, the longtime online news aggregator, but look closely at the actual source. Travel and Tannins. Anyone want to tell us who \u201cTravel and Tannins\u201d is?<\/p>\n
Or how about this one, just this week, contending that thanks to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, \u201cAmerica is electrifying its Amtrak long-distance train network — the passenger rail service connecting 500 cities getting the clean electric overhaul it has needed for half a century.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Really?<\/p>\n
Considering that the long-distance services all run on someone else\u2019s right-of-way, how would Amtrak even do that? And if that were really a provision in the IIJA, don\u2019t you think we\u2019d all know it by now since the bill became law five years ago, in 2021?<\/p>\n
Psychologists and social scientists have been looking at this phenomenon pretty closely in recent years, given how easy it is today to pass along genuine junk, blurring the line between fact and fantasy and polluting the \u201cmarketplace of ideas\u201d with poisonous sludge.<\/p>\n
One of the major reasons people pass along fake news is because it aligns precisely with their preconceived notions or, worse, with their deepest hopes. It\u2019s called \u201cmotivated reasoning.\u201d People will eagerly pass along things that they really want to be true. I really want the Washington Nationals to win the World Series…but that doesn\u2019t make it likely.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the thing, though: study after study shows that the spread of misinformation online isn\u2019t primarily explained by stupidity, or poor education, or the moral failures of the people who believe and share it (which is what you see in comment sections everywhere online).<\/p>\n
Instead, those hundreds of studies in cognitive psychology, communication research, and behavioral economics, pretty convincingly demonstrate that falling for misinformation is a feature of normal human cognition, trying hard to make sense of environments for which it wasn\u2019t designed.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur brains didn\u2019t evolve to process the tsunami of information we face daily. The average person encounters the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of data every single day \u2013 a stark contrast to our ancestors\u2019 information environment,\u201d writes Octavio Ortega Esteban, a psychologist who works in IT<\/a> and specializes in examining how brains and technology interact. \u201cThis mismatch between our cognitive architecture and modern information consumption creates vulnerabilities that fake news exploits with remarkable efficiency.\u201d<\/p>\n Esteban points to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology which found that participants spent an average of just 2.5 seconds evaluating the credibility of news headlines before deciding whether to believe or share them. This rapid processing relies heavily on cognitive shortcuts (heuristics) rather than careful analysis \u2013 creating perfect conditions for fake news to flourish.<\/p>\n So, what to do? Well, this blog article is one way I\u2019m trying to do my part. It\u2019s my attempt at what the researchers call \u201cprebunking,\u201d a kind of psychological inoculation to expose you to weakened forms of misinformation along with explanations of the manipulation techniques you\u2019re seeing used. By warning you about the threat, exposing you to the weakened version of the nonsense, explaining it to you, and giving you the opportunity to practice evaluating it yourself, I\u2019m (I hope!) giving you some tools to help you spot the fake train stories out in the wild, where you can debunk them yourself.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a technique you can use yourself called SIFT, which stands for Stop \/ Investigate the source \/ Find better coverage \/ Trace claims and quotes to their original source. Esteban suggests you use that technique like this: when you encounter some breathless story about, say, new high-speed rail service seven times a day to Caribou, Maine, you stop to take a breath and ask yourself if you know this is true (Stop), Google the author and the publication (Investigate), search for the claim on fact-checking sites (Find), and follow links until you reach original data or statements (Trace).<\/p>\n