How to Protect Yourself From Manipulation

Why Intelligence and Critical Thinking Are Not Enough

Géricault, La Monomane de l'envie — Théodore Géricault, *La Monomane de l’envie*—or what three hours of scrolling can do to you.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We have more access to information than ever before, but the information that we see is that which is most likely to grab and hold our attention. We might wonder whether this is knowledge at all—or, in fact, the opposite of knowledge.

Fake news is not new. A year after the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Cleopatra sent word to Mark Antony that she had killed herself. Believing the report, Antony stabbed himself—only to discover that Cleopatra was still alive. What’s new is the speed and precision with which a falsehood can be targeted at millions.

How Manipulation Works

Manipulation seldom consists in an outright lie. Rather, it consists in controlling the picture. Each statement may be true, while the picture created by those selected statements is profoundly false.

Imagine two reporters covering the same protest. One focuses on the peaceful marchers; the other, the broken windows. One interviews the protesters; the other, the shopkeepers. Both reports may be factually accurate, and yet leave us with a misleading picture of what happened. That’s why fact-checking, though important, can only take us so far. Facts need context, proportion, and balance.

Manipulation works because we are biased. We tend to notice the information that confirms our existing beliefs while ignoring what challenges them. The first person to manipulate me is not a politician or an algorithm, but myself.

That is why intelligence and critical thinking are not sufficient defences. Often, we reach the conclusion that suits us and then reason backwards towards it. Indeed, intelligence can simply make us better at this kind of backward reasoning.

Engagement algorithms are designed in ways that exploit this. They show us not what is most true or important, but what is most likely to captivate and agitate us. Artificial intelligence then gives those selected fragments fluency and persuasive force, so that they hit harder and I am more likely to share them—thereby amplifying the message and lending it whatever credibility I may have.

How to Defend Ourselves

Whenever words give us a strong feeling before they give us a good reason, we should pause to create some mental distance. In that breathing space, we should ask: Who is speaking? What do they want from me? And what have they left out?

But most importantly, we should ask: Why do I want this to be true?

Truth requires more than intelligence. It requires qualities such as self-knowledge, humility, and justice.

Manipulation feeds us misleading fragments; truth asks us to recover the whole.