DEMOCRACY/EXPLAIN/ CONNECT/ DISCOURSE/ INTERNET/MESSAGES/ NATURE OR NURTURE: A CRISIS OF TRUST/MEDIA/ AND REASON IN/VALUES/ THE DIGITAL AGE./TRUST/ JUDGEMENT/ACCURACY/ REASONING/FAKE NEWS/ EDUCATION/EXPRESSION/ FOCUS/OBJECTIVITY Nature or Nurture: A Crisis of Trust and Reason in the Digital Age Tim Cooper and Jem Thomas Published in Great Britain in 2019 by Albany Associates Tintagel House 92 Albert Embankment London SE1 7TY www.albanyassociates.com Copyright © Albany Associates 2019 Printed in the UK by BookPrintingUK All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book. ISBN 978-1-5272-5191-5 Nature or Nurture: A Crisis of Trust and Reason in the Digital Age About the authors Tim Cooper studied Astrophysics at University College London, Philosophy of Science in Bologna, Italy, and has a PhD in the History of Science from the University of Manchester. He has worked for the OSCE, the UN and the British Government in Bosnia, Kosovo and Lebanon as a political adviser and media expert. Over the last decade he has worked for the two principal European Union Agencies dealing with migration and asylum as a researcher and analyst. Jem Thomas is Director of Training and Research at Albany Associates. He has over 15 years of global experience working in complex and politically divisive communications environments, from the Western Balkans to East Africa. Originally a qualified engineer officer in the Royal Navy, academically he also has Masters degrees in political sciences from the Universities of Cambridge and St Andrews and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Social Science Research Methods from University College London. Nature or Nurture: A Crisis of Trust and Reason in the Digital Age Foreword By Sir Robert Fry The End of History seems a distant memory now. Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, expanded into book form and published in 1992, saw a world approaching an end point of humanity’s sociocultural development and a final, universal form of government. That humanity is not so easily corralled and government not so easily defined may not surprise us; indeed, we may be encouraged by the unpredictable vitality both continue to show, but it is remarkable that what at the time looked like a moment of epochal triumph for the West now looks so much more complex, divisive and confusing. Neither has history stood still in the 21st Century. A financial crisis with few historical precedents and the Wars of 9/11 have completely changed the global landscape, aided and abetted by a revolution in communications that has to look back to the invention of the printing press to find anything of comparable significance. Brexit, Trump and concepts like illiberal democracy are symptoms rather than causes of a new normal in which fake news, hate speech and computational propaganda have entered the language and are the everyday currency of communications. Taking the long view, we may be at one of those millennial moments where fundamental value is redefined. Feudal societies were defined by the ownership of land and the consequential relationship between aristocrat and peasant. In the same way, industrial societies were defined by the ownership of capital and the consequential relationship between capitalist and proletarian. Perhaps digital societies will be defined by the ownership of data and the consequential relationship between Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of us. If so, we are only at the start of a long process and the sooner we understand the new rules of the game, the better. Commentators have tried their best to write the new rulebook. Thomas Piketty has addressed the economics in Capital in the 21st Century; Niall Ferguson has tried to put some shape on the societal implications in The Square and the Tower; Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin have looked at the politics in National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy and Douglas Murray has explored the sociology in The Madness of Crowds. To this growing canon, Albany Associates has now made a short but significant contribution. Significant because it blends the experience of a company that makes its living in the toughest of communications environments with the intellectual curiosity of its two authors, Tim Cooper and Jem Thomas. At the seam of several academic disciplines and the real world of communications practice, Cooper and Thomas bring a rigorous analysis which guides us through a new normal where every prejudice has its own echo chamber and it is far easier to have pre-conception confirmed than challenged by open debate. Above all, they make the vital point that the debate is fundamentally about human response and not technological determination, and, in doing so, they remind us of the responsibility we all have to play a role in shaping our future. London, October 2019 Nature or Nurture: A Crisis of Trust and Reason in the Digital Age Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................. 5 Introduction ........................................................................................... 7 The problem .................................................................................................................................. 7 Analysis ............................................................................................................................................. 7 Psycho-social characteristics ............................................................................................ 8 Contemporary information ecology ............................................................................. 8 Political communications .................................................................................................... 9 Belief and how to change it ............................................................................................... 9 Outline of the text ................................................................................................................... 10 Part one: The new normal ................................................................... 11 Nationalism, globalism and inequality .................................................................... 11 Confidence in institutions .................................................................................................. 16 The return of populism ........................................................................................................ 22 Polarisation ................................................................................................................................. 26 The return of hate speech ................................................................................................. 29 Immigration ................................................................................................................................ 32 Terrorism ....................................................................................................................................... 35 Post-truth world ....................................................................................................................... 36 The big picture .......................................................................................................................... 38 Part two: The psycho-social basis ....................................................... 41 Economics or psychology? ................................................................................................ 41 Frames, availability, emotion, risk and priming ................................................ 47 Political opinions ...................................................................................................................... 51 Authoritarianism ..................................................................................................................... 54 Economics and normative threat ................................................................................ 59 1 Status threat ............................................................................................................................... 63 Polarisation ................................................................................................................................. 65 Motivated reasoning ............................................................................................................ 69 Unhealthy scepticism ........................................................................................................... 75 Trust .................................................................................................................................................. 76 Social capital .............................................................................................................................. 81 Immigration, diversity and prejudice ........................................................................ 84 The big picture .......................................................................................................................... 85 Part three: Information ecology in the digital age .............................. 89 Individual humans as consumers ................................................................................