It’s received wisdom today that tribalism, confirmation bias and other mental
errors are deeply embedded in human nature. And once social media began 
exploiting these forces, truth didn’t stand a chance. Well, not so fast. Today’s
guest is David Rand, professor of management and brain and cognitive 
sciences at MIT. To cite a very incomplete list of his accolades, he has been 
recognized by the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarship; 
the Poynter Institute, which named him fact-checking researcher of the year,
and just this past fall by the Thinkers 50 Radar List. His research bridges 
cognitive science, behavioral economics and social psychology, and from 
that vantage, he argues that consumers of media have more free will than you 
might think and that there are ways out of our information dystopia. Dave 
and I will cover the role of distraction in the spread of misinformation, how 
fact-checking might actually scale, and why Americans are actually receptive
to other points of view, if you just give them a chance.

Website - free episode transcripts
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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com