Post-truth Politics and Collective Gaslighting

Abstract

Post-truth politics has been diagnosed as harmful to both knowledge and democracy. I argue that it can also fundamentally undermine epistemic autonomy in a way that is similar to the manipulative technique known as gaslighting. Using examples from contemporary politics, I identify three categories of post-truth rhetoric: the introduction of counternarratives, the discrediting of critics, and the denial of more or less plain facts. These strategies tend to isolate people epistemically, leaving them disoriented and unable to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources. Like gaslighting, post-truth politics aims to undermine epistemic autonomy by eroding someone's self-trust, in order to consolidate power. Shifting the focus to the effects on the victim allows for new insights into the specific harms of post-truth politics. Applying the concept of gaslighting to this domain may also help people recognize a pernicious dynamic that was invisible to them before, giving them an important tool to resist it.

Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases

“…Essentially, it might be regarded as a kind of "g factor" of biases (for a similar idea, see Fiedler, 2000;Fiedler et al, 2018;Metcalfe, 1998). Following from this, we expect natural (e.g., interindividual) or experimentally induced differences in the belief of making correct assessments (e.g., undermining it; for discussions on the phenomenon of gaslighting, e.g., see Gass & Nichols, 1988;Rietdijk, 2018;Tobias & Joseph, 2020) to be mirrored not only in biases based on this but also other beliefs (H 3 ). However, in consideration of the fact that we essentially regard several biases as a tendency to confirm the underlying fundamental belief (via belief-consistent information processing), "successfully" biased information processing should nourish the belief in one's making correct assessments-as one's prior beliefs have been confirmed (H 4 ).…”

Science Communication as a Collective Intelligence Endeavor: A Manifesto and Examples for Implementation

“…Second, aggregating independent expert judgements can mitigate bias in evidence interpretation and enhance accurate assessment (Boland, 1989). Further, communicating judgements that fairly represent those of a collective avoids the false balance that may be presented if an audience only hears from a few, unrepresentative experts (Dixon & Clarke, 2012;Goodin & Spiekermann, 2015;Rietdijk & Archer, 2021). Showing the distribution of judgements can highlight when there is a consensus or, when judgements differ, it can illustrate the uncertainties involved in interpreting the available evidence (e.g., metafact, which displays aggregated answers to scientific questions) and experts' level of confidence in the state of knowledge (e.g., Mastrandrea et al, 2011).…”

Tightlacing and Abusive Normative Address

“…As Beerbohm and Davis (2021: 3) put it, Gaslighting commonly works by providing higher-order evidence: gaslighters do not so much directly deny the claim they want to suppress, but rather present the victim with alleged evidence that their belief-forming mechanisms are faulty. Thus, while the gaslighter's aim is the suppression of a specific belief or piece of testimony, their strategy targets the victim's trust in their own epistemic capacities (Spear 2019: 6-10) and undermines their epistemic autonomy (Rietdijk 2021). Departing slightly from Abramson's established use of the term, we believe it would be theoretically beneficial to distinguish between Gaslighting, taken to be behaviour that intentionally aims at undermining someone's epistemic self-trust, and the typical, though not necessary, motivation of gaslighters.…”