Thinking about information from the perspective inside Russia

 One of the most important tasks, intellectually speaking, is to make an effort to think about an issue from the perspective of those with whom you disagree, no matter how vehemently.  One need not agree, nor even find a point of agreement, but one should seek to understand why others disagree.  Russia presents a unique problem in this respect.  When we study a country like Afghanistan, we can study their interpretations of religion, and how those interpretations of religion lead to political beliefs.  This is not a popular thing to say among some quarters, but in ideological terms, the distance between the median Afghani and the Taliban just is not that great.  Afghanistan is a country that, separate from the Taliban, embraces religious doctrines in which apostates are put to death.  I shall not vacation there.  If we think of ideology in spatial terms and Euclidean distance, as I do, the Euclidean distance between most Afghan citizens and the Taliban is less than the Euclidean distance between most Afghan citizens and John Stuart Mill, as measured by questions like whether or not apostasy should be punishable by execution by the state.  See, for example, the Pew study.  So, when the Taliban rush back in after we leave, facing little resistance, should we be surprised?  No.  Ukraine, on other other hand, shows by its resistance to Russia how its citizens think about Western liberalism, it a classical sense, and autocracy.  But what about Russia?  How can we unpack Russia?

From an outside perspective, we look at Russian propaganda in a variety of ways.  A few of our crazier politicians, Fox News, Donald Trump... OK, a discomfiting number of people in America spout Russian propaganda, and the partisan split tells us something.  In a competitive system with a partisan divide, people have psychological incentives to accept claims that conform to their existing beliefs, reinforce those beliefs, or simply provide comfort, which can also come in the form of anger at the opposing side.  Similarly, people have the choice to hide themselves in media silos in which they never receive challenging messages, factuality be damned.  If this sounds like John Zaller, gold star for you.

But here's the thing.  S.  Things.  Two things.  And an almost fanatical devotion to the pope.  Russia has neither a competitive political system, nor an open informational system, at least at the surface level.  Politically, Putin runs the game.  There are no real elections in Russia.  He's the dictator, and everything is fixed.  The media environment is strange.  There are Russian state media outlets, which give Russians the Kremlin line, and the easiest thing to do, for the laziest Russian is that.

Then, though, there is the fact that in the 21st Century, we have this thing called "the internet."  There's also some history.  Plenty of Russians are old enough to remember the USSR, and plenty others might actually have the basic sense to think, wait, state media?  Are they really gonna give me the straight truth?  Should I trust everything they tell me?

So the skeptic, or at least, the meta-skeptic asks, can the Russians really be gullible enough to believe the obvious, transparent lies being fed to them by Putin?

[As he looks around at a population of Americans who believe plenty of stupid shit...]

This matters.  This matters for several reasons.  It matters as we consider the moral culpability of the Russian citizenry, and it matters as we think through Putin's political future.

So put yourself in the position of a Russian, in modern-day Russia, listening to state tv, being told that Ukraine is run by nazis, and preparing chemical attacks on Russia, and all the other crazy shit Putin is saying.  What do you think?  From the perspective of the median Russian, what do you think?

In many ways, this is an interesting test of propaganda that we have been unable to run.  North Korea is a closed state.  We basically cannot study it.  Nazi Germany predated survey data, and did not operate on a decades-long time frame.  The USSR was a closed state.  China?  There is a lot of censorship, a significant amount of lying, it is hard to do research, and that's probably our other best case, but from a scholarly perspective, in a weird way, Russia is giving us a kind of test case on propaganda, and one that is different from China in some vital ways.

Most notably, that memory of the USSR, and a bit of liberalization, followed by the cracking down.  That process, one can hypothesize, would create some skepticism of state media.  A reasonable hypothesis.  Of course, the other issue is one of effort.  How far out of your way do you have to go to get real information?  All Putin really needs to do is to change the effort calculation, and a significant majority will hear primarily Kremlin propaganda.

But even then, if you know that it is Kremlin messaging, my question to you is, what do you think about it?  Do you have any skepticism about it?

Research on media effects has gone in waves.  In the aftermath of WWII, political scientists were quite worried about media effects, but we had a wave of scholarship in which empirical analysis did not find the kinds of effects that scholars expected to find.  Eventually, analysis attenuated to agenda-setting/framing/priming effects.  But what about a decades-long system in a place that never had a culture of Western liberalism or Enlightenment rationality in the first place?

Look, from Marx to Stalin to Lysenko.

If everyone around you says a thing, even if it is obviously, stupidly wrong, do you believe it?

How old is the Earth?  Which magic sky-man made it, in which comic book origin story?  If everyone around you tells you that Comic Book A is the one, true book, that's your Comic Book.  If you're born in a different country, where everyone reads Comic Book B, that's your Comic Book, science be damned.

Amid the replication crisis in psychology, I spent some time recently checking in on the Asch line experiment.  With all of the famous studies that failed to replicate, did Aschy-boy fall by the wayside?  Nope.  There is variation in context, and all sorts of cool stuff, but the core finding is there.  I actually remembered a high school teacher pulling this one in a psych class, lo' those many years ago, just for demonstration purposes, but there's a point at which memory becomes unreliable, so it was important to check on actual replication studies.  Yup.  Asch replicated.

And of course, you can see the length of the lines.  All Russian state media will show the Russian populace is some broadcaster spouting lies, a few images that can be described in various ways, and then that one incident with the rogue journalist facing prison time now, but...

Point being, to be a Russian and maintain skepticism about what they are being told requires one of a few things.  It could happen from memories of the USSR, but that might just lead to withdrawal from politics.  "It's all just lies, it never changes."  Putin is fine with that.  It could happen from seeking out foreign media, but that requires speaking foreign languages.  Or, that weird thing that some few have called "scientist-brain."

And here's the trick.  You know who thinks they have that thing?  Conspiracy theorists.  Conspiracy theorists love to do that thing where they say "wake up, sheeple," or some such.

What allows fact-checking is cross-referencing and the application of Occam's razor.  Conspiracy theorists apply Macco's baseball bat, smash a bunch of shit, and try to use the pieces to construct a Rube Goldberg machine.  Good luck with that.  Yet, cross-referencing requires multiple sources, which requires being able to use sources other than state media.

Yet understanding that may simply be too high a hurdle.  So yes, with decades of Putin-controlled media, Russians may really believe what he's selling.  You might too.

Human brains are defective.

Living Colour, "Information Overload."  This is a live version of the track from their second album, Time's Up.  Corey Glover requests that you please stop asking him about that thing he was wearing.  He is a great singer, and as I mentioned recently, Vernon Reid is one of the greatest guitarists in history, so please stop it with the bad fashion of the 1980s.

OK, fine, make a few jokes.  It was godawful.

Now listen to Vernon shred.