We are currently awash in fake news and conspiracy theories. From reader Jason, I received this 2018 article that discussed what effect cognitive abilities have on people’s vulnerability to fake news. It highlights a particularly significant risk factor, that people they identified as having low cognitive ability have a particularly hard time rejecting misinformation.

What do they mean by ‘cognitive ability’?

First proposed by the cognitive psychologists Lynn Hasher and Rose Zacks, this theory holds that some people are more prone to “mental clutter” than other people. In other words, some people are less able to discard (or “inhibit”) information from their working memory that is no longer relevant to the task at hand—or, as in the case of Nathalie, information that has been discredited. Research on cognitive aging indicates that, in adulthood, this ability declines considerably with advancing age, suggesting that older adults may also be especially vulnerable to fake news. Another reason why cognitive ability may predict vulnerability to fake news is that it correlates highly with education. Through education, people may develop meta-cognitive skills—strategies for monitoring and regulating one’s own thinking—that can be used to combat the effects of misinformation.

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According to the coronavirus dashboard created by Avi Schiffman, yesterday the US passed the 200,000 mark in deaths from the disease. The US continues to lead the world in both deaths and the number of cases, the latter number now about 6,800,000. The numbers are growing fast in India and Brazil.

What is infuriating is that the US numbers would have been much lower if Trump and the people around him and listened to the infectious disease and public health experts at the beginning and implemented their recommendations, most of which are extremely commonsensical, such as washing or sanitizing one’s hands, avoiding close proximity to others, and wearing masks, with the government coordinating a national policy of supplying protective equipment to health care personnel and the public and aggressively promoting widespread testing.

Instead we had, and continue to have, Trump promoting magical thinking that the virus will somehow disappear on its own, even though we now know that he was aware from almost the beginning that the virus was dangerous and could be transmitted by airborne particles.

After breezily and wrongly predicting, against all the evidence, that we should not worry about the coronavirus because it would magically go away, Trump is now predicting, again against all the evidence, that we should not worry about climate change because the world will magically get cooler.

During his visit to the US West Coast, Mr Trump repeated his argument that poor forest management was to blame as he met Californian officials involved in the battle against the wildfires at a stop near Sacramento, in the centre of the state.

Dismissing one official’s plea to not “ignore the science” on climate change, Mr Trump said: “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch… I don’t think science knows actually.”
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After he was exposed as publicly playing down the seriousness of the virus even though he knew it was highly contagious and dangerous, Trump said that he only did so so as not to create panic. That explanation has been blasted as dangerous by creating a false sense of complacency at a time when accurate information was essential so that steps could be taken to minimize the spread.

But it appears that even now his administration is trying to minimize the danger by pressuring the scientists who work for the Centers for Disease Control to change their reports to comport with his optimistic statements.
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