Misinformation as Fictional Experience

We all hold, for a variety of reasons, false beliefs. In general, however, we are able to revise our false beliefs when confronted with (enough) countervailing evidence. Yet, some sets of false beliefs—say, certain conspiracy theories or political “fake news”—that are shared by large groups of people seem particularly resistant to (often considerable amounts of) countervailing evidence. This phenomenon is, in some ways, quite puzzling. How are we to explain the persistence, for large swathes of the population and in the face of sometimes abundant countervailing evidence, of often very complex sets of false beliefs? What could explain that some people, who are otherwise well-enough-functioning epistemic agents, repeatedly fail to revise or abandon those false beliefs? In this paper, we first suggest that the distinctive resilience of those sets of false beliefs is best explained by analyzing this phenomenon as one of group misinformation. Explaining the relevant beliefs and attitudes of individuals requires to understand the way they relate to and participate in a community of beliefs. Further, we argue that certain cases of group misinformation are sometimes best understood as the collective participation in a form of fictional experience. When reading a novel, watching a movie, or playing a game, we enjoy immersing ourselves in stories we well know are not real; truth is not at stake, because truth-aptness is suspended; yet we are cognitively and emotionally involved in the fictional experience we are living (Searle 1975; Walton 1978). While at first misinformation and fiction may appear to rely on opposite cognitive attitudes, we suggest that our fiction model accounts for important aspects of group misinformation, such as indifference to truth or narrative pleasure, that the dominant accounts of misinformation often overlook or struggle to explain. One popular way to explain the persistence of false beliefs within misinformed groups equates group misinformation with a form of collective illusion, in which credulous individual members attempt to reduce their cognitive dissonance by actively suppressing evidence that could rebut their collective beliefs (Festinger 1957). More recent accounts of group misinformation insist on the partisan or ideological motivations behind the persistent assertion of false beliefs by group members, in effect casting doubt on the notion of misinformed collective beliefs altogether (Cassam 2021; Levy et Ross 2021). While the first account portrays group members as gullible victims complicit in their own error, the second tends to depict them as political masterminds, carelessly manipulating truth to advance their partisan or ideological objectives. The fiction model stands in between, allowing for the possibility that misinformed group members both believe and do not believe in the false information they share and in the political claims they make on its basis. We argue that misinformed groups’ resistance to refutation is akin to the cognitive and emotional ambivalence which characterizes the fictional experience. Understanding group misinformation as participation in a fictional experience also allows us to account for the emotional bonding between group members as well as the collective pleasure they express while sharing false information online.