Tools we use to determine what to trust

I rarely use Facebook, but I recently took a brief look. I was reminded how annoying it is when I was presented with numerous posts, photos and videos from people I don’t know. One caught my attention. It was a video of three adult male moose, all with huge antlers, attacking a colourfully decorated bus. Could the video possibly be real?

Curiously, it reminded me of a sentence in the memorandum of understanding between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. It says, “Canada and Alberta remain committed to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.” Is that a true statement?

How can I know if either is true? For the moose video, I could try examining it carefully for oddities. For the politicians’ assertion, I could delve into their past statements about climate change. But that’s rather impractical. Given the deluge of information I encounter every day, I couldn’t possibly research every statement to check its veracity. What should I do?

I could use a common tactic. I could rely on shortcuts.

One shortcut is to decide based on the trustworthiness of the information’s source. That’s something everyone does frequently. I believe the morning news I read because I trust the newspaper reporters and editors. I know what I ate for breakfast because I trust my memory. Trust is a shortcut we often use to simplify our decisions about whether to believe information from sources.

One way to think about whether a source is trustworthy is to consider its intention and ability to be truthful. The Farmer’s Almanac might intend to provide an accurate long-range weather forecast, but do its authors have the ability? Russian President Vladimir Putin has the ability to negotiate a peace treaty with Ukraine, but does he have the intention? Trusting either the Almanac or Putin on those matters might be ill advised.

Another shortcut for deciding truth is to notice how unusual a new piece of information is — how well it fits with what you already believe is true. Of course, your current beliefs were accumulated throughout your life, so hopefully they were carefully acquired. If you believe the Greek god Zeus is responsible for lightning, you’ll find the standard meteorological explanation to be weird.

Trust and weirdness detection often work together.

Assessing weirdness can help you verify information from even your most trusted sources. You might trust your math teacher to provide excellent geometry instruction, but you could still detect an error she makes in class because it seems unusual.

And trust can cause you to believe something that seems weird. I was convinced that only plants do photosynthesis, so it was a surprise to learn recently that someone found an animal — a kind of sea slug — that can also do it. That strange information came from trustworthy sources, so I now believe it. For something exceptionally peculiar, read about Einstein’s relativity discoveries and be told, for example, that time advances at different rates at sea level and at the top of mountains. That will surprise many people, but I believe it because I’m aware it’s been thoroughly verified by physicists.

When someone’s trust assignment and weirdness detection are faulty, bizarre behaviour can occur. Trump’s millions of hardcore MAGA supporters provide an example. They seem to trust him completely and appear unable to detect the madness of many of his pronouncements. The result is seemingly unconditional support for a deranged tyrant.

Using the weirdness shortcut, I suspected the Facebook video was false: I’d never seen multiple, mature male moose co-operating with each other. My disbelief was amplified by my strong distrust of Facebook as a source of facts, and I had no basis for trusting the video’s producer. In this case, I took the time to investigate the video further. One wheel of the bus behaved oddly, and the physics of the bus’ movement seemed off while it was being pushed by the moose trio. Oh, and the video was produced by a Facebook user who specializes in creating AI content “to bring joy.”

Regarding the truth of the memorandum’s joint net-zero-by-2050 commitment, I’m very doubtful. I certainly don’t trust Smith because I’m suspicious of her intention, and her saying anything supportive about fighting climate change seems shocking. My jury’s still out on Carney’s truthfulness. He’s been earning my trust as a manager of Canada’s economy in a perilous time, but he’s done very little to earn it as a leader addressing the world’s climate crisis.

It seems extremely weird that he could claim on budget day that Canada will meet its Paris Accord climate objectives and, soon thereafter in the memorandum, cancel the oil and gas emissions cap, encourage enhanced oil recovery and commit to building an oil pipeline.

Calvin Brown writes from his home in the RM of St. Andrews.