The nature of truthiness is that, as Stephen Colbert says, you don't need to know any facts-- gut feelings are enough. If it feels true it must be true. In her award-nominated book, Jane Mayer (2008) describes how newly-minted U.S. interrogators garnered misguided intuitions about the effectiveness of torture from the TV show, "24," where the hero, Jack Bauer, used torture to extract valuable information to save America each week. It didn't matter that real-life interrogators had different intuitions and practical knowledge about the ineffectiveness of torture based on their extensive training and experience (Roper, 2004; Sands, 2008). Military commanders reported that the show was promoting unethical and illegal behavior among young American soldiers who both imitated Jack Bauer's actions and judged the conduct patriotic (Mayer, 2007).They ‘felt' it to be true and acted on it.
According to the doctrine of truthiness, ‘my personal truth is mine, so what's it to you?' why should it matter to you what I think? Well, clearly it does matters to citizens if their government engages in torture against world law and thereby endangers our soldiers and citizens (Mayer, 2008). And, if you step into the realm of health and healthcare, for example, one can quickly see that the truthfulness of a "fact" really is a matter of life or death-like the safety of a drug like Vioxx. Spreading and believing the falsehoods of death panels and forced euthanasia if health care insurance is reformed is detrimental not only to those who believe the falsehoods but to everyone else whose healthcare may not improve as a result of thwarting change.
If truth is only a matter of feeling, then all I have to do is trigger feelings in you and link those feelings to something I want you to believe---like drinking beer makes you attractive to sexy people. Or, that eating junk food is a matter of freedom. Or that buying my product will make you happy. I can manipulate your fears by linking scary images with things I want you to be afraid of-like healthcare reform with Nazism or euthanasia. Even though none of this is actually true, I can make you believe it is true. Hence, you become mired in truthiness.
Based on misinformation, we can make the wrong inferences (like "torture works," "poor people are lazy") and draw the wrong conclusions (that healthcare reform is going to institute "death committees"). Worse, we take the wrong actions, like storm town hall meetings with the belief that our congressmen are evil and must be silenced. Actions built on truthiness and dysrationality compound real problems and keep us from solving the problems that need our attention (Trout, 2009). Dysrationality is destructive when applied to social life large and small (Stanovich, 1994). We can see the effects of misunderstandings and distortions when linked with fear and frustration (as in the uncivil town hall meetings in August 2009). Social order and effective problem solving break down.
But aren't intuitions good? Haven't we been told that intuitions are a good way to make decisions (e.g., Malcolm Gladwell's, Blink)? Even purveyors of evolutionary psychology imply that gut feelings are central to the moral life (Haidt, 2001). Yes, sometimes intuitions are just the right thing to follow. Like when your stomach turns when you smell an old hot dish in the fridge, or see that old abusive boyfriend. But sometimes you've developed poor intuitions, just like George Costanza on Seinfeld (The Opposite). It is only when he does the opposite of his intuitions that he becomes successful in love and life. All intuitions are not equal. Intuitions depend on where they are developed and how.
We all can succumb to truthiness. It feels so good to believe our gut feelings. We latch onto information that confirms our intuitions, ignoring disconfirming information (too uncomfortable!). Like Colbert, we all fall into the traps of poor thinking (e.g., focusing on what pops in the mind first). Things just "seem right" so they must "be" right. To keep checking on our rationality we need deliberation and civil dialogue to uncover our truthiness and reroute it, retrain it. More on that coming up.
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References
Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814-834.
Mayer, J. (February 19, 2007). Whatever It Takes: The politics of the man behind "24." The New Yorker, 83(1), 66-82.
Mayer, J. (2008). The Dark Side: The inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals. New York: Doubleday.
Roper, L. (2004). Witch Craze: Women and Evil in Baroque Germany. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Sands, P. (2008). Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stanovich, K. (1994). Reconceptualizing intelligence: Dysrationalia as an intuition pump. Educational Researchers, 23(4), 11-22.
Trout, J.D.. (2009). The Empathy gap. New York: Viking/Penguin.
