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Post-Truth

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Post-Truth

Post-truth refers to a condition in which appeals to emotion and personal belief are more effective in shaping public opinion than objective facts. Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year for 2016.

Primary source for this wiki: harari-2018-21-lessons (Chapter 17)

Harari’s View: It Is Not New

yuval-noah-harari pushes back against the idea that post-truth is a recent invention of social media. His argument:

  1. Humans have always been susceptible to narrative over fact — Homo sapiens evolved to believe and spread shared myths, because shared fictions enable large-scale social cooperation. Agriculture, empires, and organised religion all required populations to believe unprovable claims.
  2. Fake news has always spread — the Catholic Church’s inquisition relied on confessions extracted under torture; the “Jewish conspiracy” myth survived centuries despite refutation.
  3. The deeper problem: humans require large-scale social fictions to coordinate at scale. The question is not whether fictions will be believed, but which fictions are socially beneficial vs. destructive.

What Is New

What social media has changed is the speed and volume of narrative spread. Algorithms optimise for engagement, and emotionally activating (outrage-inducing, tribal-affirming) content generates more engagement than accurate but boring facts. This amplifies the pre-existing human tendency toward motivated reasoning.

Connection to cognitive-biases

Post-truth operates through well-documented cognitive mechanisms: confirmation bias (seek information confirming existing beliefs), identity-protective cognition (evaluate evidence based on tribal identity), and the availability heuristic (repeated exposure makes claims feel true). These are System 1 processes that post-truth media environments exploit systematically.

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