Psychology in Everyday Life

Exploring the science behind how we think, feel and behave.

When a Quote Isn’t a Quote: The Psychology of Misinformation in a Post-Truth World

“The most dangerous form of blindness is believing that your perspective is the only reality.”

It is a good quote. In fact, it is such a good quote that I nearly shared it, but there was just one problem: Friedrich Nietzsche, to whom it is repeatedly attributed online, does not appear to have said it. Does that really matter? I think it does, not because incorrectly attributing an inspirational quotation is going to bring civilisation crashing down, but because it tells us something important about the way we consume and share information.

If something sounds plausible, fits with what we already believe and comes attached to the name of someone suitably impressive, how often do we stop to check whether it is actually true? In this case, there is an additional twist, because the quotation circulating under Nietzsche’s name is remarkably similar to something genuinely written by psychologist and communication theorist Paul Watzlawick:

“The belief that one’s own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.”

Watzlawick wrote this in How Real Is Real?, published in the 1970s. His work explored communication, perception and the ways in which human beings construct their understanding of reality. So, somewhere along the way, a psychologist’s observation appears to have been polished into a more social-media-friendly sentence and handed to a nineteenth-century philosopher.

But does it sound like Nietzsche?

Interestingly, yes, up to a point. Nietzsche is closely associated with perspectivism, the idea that human beings never approach the world from a completely neutral and detached position. Our knowledge is inevitably influenced by perspective, interpretation, values and experience. He criticised philosophers who behaved as though they had somehow escaped their own standpoint and were describing reality from nowhere in particular.

That means the sentiment behind the misattributed quotation is not wildly alien to Nietzsche. In fact, that probably helps to explain why the attribution survives. If a quotation sounds sufficiently like something a person might have said, we are far less likely to question whether they actually did.

Nietzsche’s position, however, was considerably more complicated than “everyone has their own truth”. Perspectivism is not simply permission to believe whatever we like, nor does it mean that every interpretation is equally good. Nietzsche was interested in questioning supposedly unquestionable truths and examining the perspectives from which claims were made.

He is also frequently described as a forerunner of existentialism, rather than an existentialist in the later, formal sense. The movement developed after his lifetime, but his writing on meaning, values, individuality and nihilism had a profound influence on twentieth-century existential thinkers. There is something rather Nietzschean, then, about questioning whether Nietzsche actually said the Nietzsche quote.

Why misinformation spreads so easily

This becomes even more interesting when we move from philosophy to psychology. Research into the illusory truth effect has repeatedly found that information can begin to feel more truthful simply because we have encountered it before. Repetition creates familiarity, and familiarity can be mistaken for accuracy. This can happen even with misinformation and even when people already possess knowledge that ought to contradict the claim.

Social media adds another difficulty. Research published in Nature found that people do not necessarily share false information because they actively believe it. Sometimes accuracy simply is not what they are concentrating on at the moment they press “share”. When people are prompted to think about accuracy, the quality of the information they share tends to improve.

That brings me to another quotation I like, this time from the late great Terry Pratchett: “A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” The thought itself is much older. Jonathan Swift observed in 1710 that “Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it.” Three hundred years before social media, he had identified the same problem: misinformation has a head start. Today, that head start may be measured in shares, reposts and millions of views.

This is where our apparently harmless Nietzsche quotation stops being entirely harmless. If we develop the habit of thinking, that sounds right, so I’ll share it, we are using the same mental shortcut whether the subject is philosophy, immigration, climate change, health, crime or politics. The stakes may be very different, but the underlying habit is the same.

Being sceptical does not mean believing nothing, and recognising that people have different perspectives does not mean that there are no facts. It means retaining enough curiosity to ask one small but increasingly important question: How do I know this is true?

In a post-truth world, that may be one of the most useful habits we can teach ourselves.