Dr. Danna Young on how to tell the truth
…and why it’s still possible for medical experts to cut through the noise
Dr. Dannagal Young is an improv comedian and reformed conspiracy theorist. She is also a professor of political science, and author of Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation. Her TED Talk, in which she explains herself (and also explains everyone), has racked up millions of views.
A few years ago I was among the rapt audience of physicians listening to Danna explain how we are all vulnerable to misinformation, no matter how objective and scientifically minded we may believe we are. Understanding what she has to say may be the first step to learning how we can communicate truth more effectively.
Her research demonstrates that we are driven by a set of common motivations, which she has dubbed the “three Cs:” comprehension, control, and community. She says that when faced with the alternatives, we tend to favor convenient explanations over complicated ones, that also keep us in the driver’s seat of our lives and connect us to others.
At a time when expertise does not automatically confer influence, her perspective is both fascinating and essential:
You’re a political scientist with a background in improv comedy. Walk me through that.
When I was around 11 and 12, I did these week-long programs in the summertime at a local university. The summer of 1988 I took a week long class in clowning, a week long class in journalism, and a week long class on the 1988 election. So I joke I have been the same person my entire life.
I started improv as an undergrad at the University of New Hampshire. I studied political philosophy in French there, and I've just always kind of liked to make people laugh, and so I did improv there for four years, and then I went to Penn for grad school, and I got into a professional company there right when I started my grad school studies.
In grad school, Jon Stewart took over the Daily Show. He brought on Ben Carlin, who had been the editor of The Onion, and so the show took a real strong political bend. Then 9/11 happened. And so Jon Stewart became a really important voice, while I was testing what happens cognitively to people who watch these things.
You were addressing a group of doctors at a meeting a couple years ago, and you told the story of how you became specifically interested in misinformation. That story is so compelling, it became a subject of an enormously popular TEDTalk. Can you talk us through it a little bit?
From 2005 to 2006 I had been married for just about two years. My husband and I had moved into a new home, and we had a baby boy. Right before our baby turned one, my husband started having peripheral vision problems, like flashes in his peripheral vision, and he received a diagnosis for a brain tumor that is technically benign and has a very high survival rate, but in adults, it's a little more complicated. His path was riddled with complications.
Mike went from a manager of 90 graphic design artists at a company, and the director of our improv company to no short term memory, no control over his bodily functions, no vision, unable to live unassisted. Thirteen brain surgeries later, we did sort of a Hail Mary surgery, and he did not survive. He passed in July of 2006 but my journey for those two years was that I felt completely out of control of my life.
And what was your reaction to that terrible experience?
I could not comprehend what was happening. I had no sense of control, and I felt completely alone. And those three things, comprehension, control and community have become sort of the tenet of my work, the tenet of my most recent book, because that lack of comprehension, control, and community is what brought me down rabbit holes.
Those rabbit holes were things like trying to understand where the brain tumor could have come from. Was it from our new home? Was it from our new neighborhood? Trying to understand, are there other avenues or mechanisms of control I could have, like alternative therapies or remedies or crystals or oils. I was up for anything. In terms of community, I had a wonderful group of friends, but when I was in those dark moments, I craved chat rooms and places where I would find people who also had sick loved ones. Those spaces felt really good, because people could identify with your pain directly. My friends loved me and supported me, but they couldn’t relate. They weren't in my shoes. That feeling of community was very powerful.
What ultimately led you out of those rabbit holes?
Part of it was understanding the science—that these brain tumors are typically in the body from the time a baby is in utero. And though it might have grown more in a particular moment, it probably was not from something in our immediate environment.
In terms of control, instead of trying to pursue alternative mechanisms, we solidified that our social norms are that we embrace science and we embrace Western medicine and we respect peer reviewed research. Control instead could come from scheduling on a Google calendar so that we knew that Mike was never alone at dinner time. Control could come from having nice music in his room, or putting pictures up. It was a real reframe to reestablish that our norms do not support going into these dark spaces, and instead thinking about how my community could help me lift Mike up. That story became more salient in my mind during the early days of COVID, and that's kind of how I ended up pursuing my most recent book.
You also wrote a fascinating, viral piece for Vox called “I was a conspiracy theorist, too.”
I put it out there because I get it, and we should all get it. Part of what's really interesting about folks who embrace conspiracy theories is that they tend to feel maligned. They tend to be misanthropists, and they tend to feel like they're misunderstood, and so if you judge, if you mock, if you ridicule, that is only going to further their commitment to their belief system. There was something really liberating about just putting it out there. Like, yeah, I'm a social scientist, but I was a conspiracy theorist, too, and in the early days of COVID, there was in fact huge uncertainty and conflicting stories about, should we wear masks? Should we not wear masks? Where did this virus come from? What should we do? Do we have to wipe down our groceries? Do we not? It was a hot mess, and it really left that feeling of confusion and lack of efficacy that tends to drive these excursions down into the holes of the internet.
I have found your work incredibly demonstrative to what we do at Maven because you perfectly articulate that most health conspiracy theorists aren’t gullible. They are in fact very smart, discerning, and curious. Why does that make them so vulnerable?
There's a trait in my field that we call “need for closure,” which is if you really like the idea of having reasons quickly and having things wrapped up. If you are high in “need for closure,” you are going to tend to be more susceptible to conspiracy theories, because they provide an efficient, causal-like explanation for what's going on, and the causal explanation is always the same. It is: there's powerful dark forces operating in the shadows to enrich themselves or hurt people, but they're hiding the truth from all of us.
These stories are powerful because our brain privileges stories about individual people. In fact, we always tend to attribute motivations to people, even in the face of natural disasters and things, because things that happen randomly are too chaotic for us to understand. We want to attribute responsibility to individual people. The other reason that they're sticky is that, listen, some conspiracies are real, right? There have, historically, been conspiracies that have been afoot to hurt or hide the truth from different communities of people, and if we ignore that and we pretend that every conspiracy theory is dumb, we lose people. Instead, we should demand evidence. We should look for the falsifiability of certain claims, but to dismiss it out of hand as unthinking and naive, is itself naive.
Right now there is this collective sense in our country that the system is deeply rigged. How can public health professionals address that belief in the way they provide scientific guidance?
You know what the real answer is? Communicating through the lens of humility. There's this term “intellectual humility,” which is simply about being open to the possibility that you might be wrong. And when people embody intellectual humility, when they operate in the world like here's my beliefs based on the evidence I have thus far, but I'm always open to the possibility I might be wrong, I'm always looking for new information…when you exist in the world like that, you will always become closer to empirical truth. Because you're always avoiding the risk of intellectual arrogance, which is when all you do is seek to confirm your prior beliefs.
In contrast, always seeking to confirm prior beliefs just makes you more prone to motivated reasoning, and confirmation bias. It will lead you down paths that are simply going to confirm what you already believe, which is fine if you're right, but we don't ever really know if we're right.
What does that guidance look like in practice for doctors and clinicians?
This is where I return to the spirit of scientific inquiry itself. The true scientist never removes themselves from doubt. We are always looking to test our theories, to falsify our theories. We're open to the possibility we could be wrong. But in the realm of medicine, we can't just exist in this hypothetical world because we have to decide what is the most appropriate course of treatment, given the evidence that's before us. I think this is where humility could go a long way in terms of cultivating relationships between patients and providers, or between large institutions and the public. We should acknowledge the uncertainty with which we operate, and acknowledge what we don't know.
Now, the other piece of this is not using the rhetoric of science when speaking with patients or the public—meaning speaking in your own voice instead. After all, we live in a social world, and we understand that there may be confusion about what the right course of action is, and we can honor that and say, I understand how confusing this is. If I had to make this decision, I would also find it confusing. This is where you can draw on your experience as an expert in the field, without getting wonky about the science, and say, I've been doing this for 20 years. I've never seen the outcome you’re worried about happen. I understand why that seems possible, but I've never seen it.
The internet has permanently changed how we communicate. Now, we’re starting to see generative AI layered on top of that. Where do you think this ecosystem of information is heading in the future?
These evolving information ecosystems are always going to reward and incentivize approaches to health and medicine that are intuitive and common sense. Now that means that empirical science might be at a disadvantage unless empirical science itself can be framed as intuitive and common sense and start to feel like it, too, is from your gut.
You’re a constitutionally optimistic person. What about this moment still gives you hope for the future of science communications?
Our media environment rewards and incentivizes conflict. Science, by contrast, is not inherently dramatic. Now suddenly, there is a lot of conflict in this moment where science is under attack. I actually see it as an opportunity for the public to rekindle its love affair with science. After all, how often are we talking about the day to day details of all the scientific inquiry that's being done in laboratories around the country? We're not talking about it! But all of a sudden we have a window.
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