Acting confident online isn't the same as being right

Before deepfakes and alternative facts, the online world was already telling us fibs. In our series Lies the Internet Told Me, we call 'em all out.

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In the classic teen comedy Clueless, new-girl Tai arrives in Beverly Hills, and popular Cher Horowitz puts herself in charge of helping Tai fit in. She tells Tai what to wear and eat, how to talk and exercise, who to have a crush on and what sort of recreational drug habits are acceptable. And Tai goes along with it all because Cher seems so unflappably confident. It has never crossed Cher’s mind that her opinion may not be law, and so, for much of the movie, it doesn’t cross Tai’s mind, either.

This is basically the same experience we all have, every time we look at social media. We are all Tai, being told what the right way is to feel and behave. (“You have to see Hamilton! You have to try cauliflower rice! IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!”) And at one point or another, we are all Cher, tweeting at the masses that the Game of Thrones finale was bad, or that anyone wearing seersucker after September is a monster.

Of course the truth is that all of these seemingly inarguable statements are, in fact, fully arguable. Large portions of the internet are just people stating their opinions with the confidence of fact. The problem comes when we, like Tai, believe that they actually know what they’re talking about.

People exhibit unwarranted conviction online for all sorts of reasons. We do so because it feels good to have certainty. And because we don’t always know that our certainty is unwarranted.

“The feeling of being correct in one’s view seems to operate similarly regardless of whether that view is inherently subjective (e.g., what one’s favorite movie is) or objectively verifiable (e.g., whether the Earth is round). Ultimately, psychological certainty is a feeling that can be tied to beliefs or facts, and it leads to pretty much the same outcomes either way,” says Dr. Zakary Tormala, an expert in social psychology and Stanford professor.

And we present confidence online because it feels good to be believed. We enjoy feeling like, out of the infinite words constantly bouncing around the internet, ours are the ones getting attention. We get a dopamine hitevery time we’re retweeted, and we’re being continuously trained that the most bombastic posts are the ones that get the most shares. It’s often bemoaned that there’s no nuance on Twitter because of the character limits. But it’s also true that there’s no nuance on Twitter because its positive reinforcement system actively rewards those who avoid nuance.

Just because someone says something with confidence, that doesn’t actually mean they know what they’re talking about.

Take this buzzworthy New York Times’ piecefrom earlier this summer: “The Aperol spritz is not a good drink." It seemed like everyone in my network was compelled to co-sign or to declare this a “bad take” — either way, they were all talking about it, and that’s what counts as internet success. Would it have gotten so many shares with the headline “I personally don’t prefer to drink Aperol spritzes”? Unlikely.

There’s not much to stop us from claiming certitude all the time. We don’t need to be anyone special or know anything special to do it. After all, we are living in a post-expertise era. And that doesn’t just mean distrust of scientists who tell us that climate change is real, or economists who tell us that immigration helpsthe economy.It also means that anybodycan style themselves as an authority, essentially claiming, as author Isaac Asimov put it, “My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

We’ve been tricked

Just because someone says something with confidence, that doesn’t actually mean they know what they’re talking about. People online are constantly telling one another “this is a bad take” and “you are the asshole” and “you should die” and “you’re ugly” and “your dog looks like Louie Gohmert.”

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And guess what? All of those are just opinions! They’re not coming from professional authorities with multiple Ph.Ds in the field of who should die! These remarks are phrased like there’s no argument to be had, so we are inclined to accept them at face value.

SEE ALSO:A survival guide for being a woman on the internet

“If we don’t know much about a topic, there can be a natural tendency to assume that people who are certain are right,” Tormala says. But it’s easy for a sentence structure to be authoritative even while its content is debatable. That’s how we get tricked into believing things.

It’s no secret that the way we frame an idea has a massive impacton how it’s understood. For example, social psychologist Ellen Langer’s classic 1978 studydemonstrated how people respond to statements that have the structureof an argument — even if the content of the argument is nonexistent. There’s a tactical reason why Trump uses phrases of certainty like “believe me” or “we’re going to,” rather than more tempered phrases like “I think” or “we’ll try.” Most politicians do; you can play around with this interactive graphicfrom the New York Timesto find evidence that politicians use “I know” more than twice as often as “I think,” five times as often as “I believe,” and 20 times as often as “I feel.” How much certainty you demonstrate has a direct impact on how much you’re believed.

When I show conviction online, I generally make it clear that I’m kidding. For example, this tweet in which I claim to authoritatively “rank all vegetables from best to worst.”

Tweet may have been deleted

On most topics, I don’t have so much certainty that I want to impose my views on the world. Some of this is just my personality as a fun gal filled with constant self-doubt. Some of it can be chalked up to the fact that I’m female.

Much has been made of the “confidence gap” between men and women. In general, most women won’t claim to know the answer to a question unless their knowledge is undeniably solid, and even then it’s not too hard to get them to doubt themselves. Men on average are more likely to volunteer answers and believe they’re correct, even if they have less legitimate cause for confidence. While anyone can act like their statements are inarguable, statistically men are more often the ones doing so.

In the early days of social media, the abbreviations “IMO” and “IMHO” (“in my opinion” and “in my humble opinion”) were common. I remember “just my two cents” getting tacked on to the end of most message board postings. Now, people seem reluctant to point out when their posts are mere opinion. Perhaps we’ve all gotten more comfortable sharing our opinions online, or as the amount of online content has ballooned, we’ve increased the drama and forcefulness of our posts so they won’t get lost in the shuffle.

Productive debate is undermined when we don’t consider that something is just one opinion, and that other opinions may be equally valid — even if we personally don’t share them. We’re also feeding the grander societal narrative that there’s no longer any such thing as “truth.” If one person posts that the crowd at President Trump’s inauguration was the largest in history, and another person posts that it wasn’t, who could blame some for throwing up their hands in frustration? At the point that opinions are presented as facts, real facts lose their significance and believability.

OK, so, what do we do about it?

I’m not here to propose that we all tone down our language or add “IMO” to the end of every sentence. (“It’s so hot in NYC today IMO.”) Tweet whatever you like. What I do think is valuable is frequently reminding ourselves not to accept something as truth just because some random person online said it. It makes me feel like I’m back in middle school, with the cooler girls saying that I had to listen to the Backstreet Boys, and I had to shave my legs, and I had to read fewer books. I believed them every single time because they acted like they knew something I didn’t. But we’re not all in middle school, and so we can protect ourselves from constantly feeling like other people have all the answers.

When you see a post that makes you feel bad, first ask yourself: Is this a knowable fact? “Trump’s inauguration crowd was the biggest of all time”— there are numbers on that; this information is knowable, even if I personally don’t know it. “You will never find a husband looking like that”— nope, I can’t fact-check that, and therefore neither can the asshole who posted it.

Look at who the source is. Do they have expertise that you trust on this matter? If not, why do you believe that they know more than you do? When somebody criticizes a book that I’ve written, my instinct is always to take their disapproval to heart, to assume that my novels actually suck and only this stranger was clever enough to notice. What helps me is going to their profile and reading their other Goodreads reviews. When I find out they also gave a one-star review to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I feel suddenly like I don’t need to care about what they look for in books, after all.

All of this brings us back to Clueless, one of my favorite movies of all time, which has 1,900 one-star reviews on IMDb. Are all those people wrong? It sure feels like it. But maybe the truth is that they’re just not me.

Via Giphy

About the author:Leila Sales is the author of a number of books for children and teens, including, most recently, If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, a novel about social media shaming and internet callout culture. Visit her at leilasales.com, and follow her on Twitter and Instagram @LeilaSalesBooks.

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