The Rest Is Science - Why Do We Turn on Innocent People?

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

Why do we turn on innocent people? A convincing story, a suspicious glance and suddenly everyone’s an armchair detective. But what happens when the crowd gets it completely wrong? Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens explore the psychology of false accusations, witch hunts and mob mentality, starting with Richard Jewell, the security guard hailed as a hero after the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing before becoming the target of a media storm. From the Salem witch trials and the Satanic Panic to internet detectives and social media pile-ons, they investigate how a hunch snowballs into certainty. Along the way: confirmation bias, beliefs that refuse to budge, and the famous Asch conformity experiments that show how easily we join the crowd, even when the crowd is obviously wrong. Plus, Michael tackles accusations that Vsauce’s Mind Field was faked, Hannah shares her own brush with conspiracy theories, and they ask why we’re so convinced we can spot a liar when the evidence suggests we’re barely better than a coin toss. It’s a journey through outrage, misinformation and our very human enthusiasm for pointing the finger. Because once people think you’re guilty, even defending yourself can look suspicious. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the rest is science. I'm Michael Stevens. And I'm Hannah Fry. For no reason at all, I thought I'd do an episode about lying. Okay. An episode about accusations, about false accusations, about witch hunts. I don't know. There's nothing in particular that gave me this as an inspiration, but... Apropos of nothing. Apropos of nothing. Let's talk about... Here's an episode about traits or...

for personalities and lying and accusing people of things that they may be innocent of. Exactly, exactly, apropos of nothing, of nothing at all. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. As if they weren't cool enough already, some astronauts have now added cancer scientists to their CV. They are making use of microgravity conditions in space to carry out experiments. That's because the same thing that lets astronauts experience weightlessness. also affects how cancer cells grow, behave, and respond to drugs. And back down on Earth, Cancer Research UK is working with astronomers

to explore tumors with technologies that are typically used to map the Milky Way, which I think gives you an idea of just how complex this disease is. That's right. There are over 200 different types of cancer. But by pushing boundaries and embracing the latest technologies, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK over the past 50 years. years. And today it is continuing to save and improve lives around the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancer researchuk.uk.org slash rest of science. From the studio that brought you WandaVision,

I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. On October 14th, the vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. Possible. Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Streaming October 14th, only on Disney Plus. It was during the Olympics in 96 in Atlanta, and security guards found this unattended backpack.

Yeah, I was 10 when it happened. But I've read a little bit about it since. Go on, you tell me it. You tell me it. Because I only found out about it like two days ago. Well, from what I remember, a guy was falsely accused for quite a while. He was like a security guard there. Yeah, that's right.

And the poor guy, like, really was just fingered. And for quite a while, it was like, yeah, it was him. And when the true perpetrator or perpetrators were discovered, the guy's like, life had been ruined. And there wasn't nearly as much attention on like, oh, no, actually, forget everything that we said about him. So he just kind of became the bomber, the Olympic bomber, but it wasn't him at all. Exactly. This story didn't have cut through here at all. When I came across it, I was really astounded. So for those of you who haven't heard the story before, this is Olympics 1996. There's a security guard that finds this unattended backpack. Officers begin

clearing the area. And they managed to do it really quickly. So when the bomb explodes, only one person dies, somebody else has a heart attack. There's 111 people who are injured, but it would have been way, way, way, way, way, way worse had there not been this quick response. So in the first 24 hours, the security guard, a guy called Richard Jewel, he's called a hero by the press. Everyone is like really thankful to him for everything he did. But then exactly as you describe, somebody. calls the FBI with a tip saying that they know Richard Jor and they think that he might have planted the bomb himself in order to look like a hero. And then, you know, the FBI do this complete

180 on this guy, just classify him as a prime suspect. And then the information gets leaked to the press and there is this massive witch hunt about this guy. So yeah, what I thought I would do today is talk to you about witch hunts more generally, about why we end up falsely accusing people, about why those false accusations can take hold, and about what you can possibly do to defend yourself, which is, as it turns out, not very much. First of all, we should say, Richard Jewel didn't do it. The true perpetrator was Eric Rudolph, and the one victim was a 44-year-old woman named Alice Hawthorne.

I say her name because that story reminded me of this comedian I watched recently, who was like, you know, the worst way to die is to be the only person who died in something really huge and newsworthy. because when people see on the news, you know, oh, a bridge collapsed. Oh, my goodness. How many people? Only one fatality. Everyone goes, oh, okay, well, God, that's not bad. And you're like, no, but it was me.

Or it was someone I love. Like, come on. It's terrible to be the one fatality in a massive tragic event because everyone goes, well, that wasn't bad. Gosh, what great point. What great boy. Isn't that? Yeah.

Yeah, if you were one of an album. I mean, at the same time, there's sort of a notoriety to it. I don't know. There is, but how many people know the name of Alice Hawthorne? I mean, not that everyone knows the name of everyone who's died in every tragedy, but Alice Hawthorne, she was killed by a nail, a piece of shrapnel from the bomb, that was planted by Eric Rudolph, not Richard Jewel. Which we now know for sure.

We now know for sure. But that's certainly not what the press was saying. But someone called the FBI and said, I don't know. this Richard Jewel, he saved a lot of lives that day. Pretty good result for him, maybe a little too good. Yeah, maybe a little bit too. People loved that angle because it was so, so dramatic. It was so like made for TV, which is how everyone heard about the story.

So the guy who called was Piedmont College President, Ray Clear, Cleary, who had worked with him before. But it was just a suspicion. Like there wasn't sort of any evidence at all. Just this very clearly was like, I don't know. The thing is that there have actually been a number of instances in history where it hasn't just been about one person who's been accused, falsely accused, but there's been a sort of a fever that has been whipped up around false accusations. And these happen, these situations happen in particular when there is some sort of benefit

to the accuser rather than to the accused. And probably the most, I mean, notorious examples, this is the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. So the Gestapo, they're actually this really small organization. There was, you know, it wasn't like this sort of loads and loads and loads of them. But because there was like, there were no repercussions for false accusations. And there's sort of, like, you kind of seen as doing a good thing to make an accusation. It really opened the door for people to use this to settle their personal disputes.

Right. So there's, you know, it was estimated that actually only 15% of Gestapo cases actually started because of some kind of surveillance, despite the fact that everybody sort of felt that they were under surveillance all the time. Most of them came from tip-offs from people in the public. And every single accusation, even if it was really trivial, they treated with this, they were meticulous about it. They were like, let's thoroughly investigate this. Let's treat it as our prime suspect.

Let's sort of, you know, guilty until proven innocent. And it's estimated that around 40% of those accusations were somehow personally motivated. Sure. Wow. So, for example, there were a married couple, the wife accused the husband of carrying out illegal abortions. which is like Gestapo territory. Okay. He ends up getting arrested and getting imprisoned.

But he says his wife has this motive, which is that he had inadvertently passed on a sexually transmitted disease to his wife and while he was having this love affair. Right. And so that was the reason why she was getting her revenge. Anyway, in the end, he had served eight months in prison before this was established as the actual motive. Oh, wow. Basically, there's lots of evidence of people using this stuff for personal game.

In the end, the Gestapo realized that actually these people who are making these false accusations were wasting loads of their time. The Ministry of Justice in Berlin wrote this letter in 1943 saying, The Denouncer is the biggest scoundrel in the whole country. I think they finally worked out that maybe just letting people accuse their neighbours of anything wasn't a good idea. Besides wasting the Gestapo's time, I guess you also create a weird society where everyone is kind of on eggshells around everyone else. And false accusations really highlight the monopoly of force that the authorities have. It's like, I need to get back at you. And the only weapon I have is the authorities, because they can actually do.

something. So I'm going to have to just use them, grab a hold of them however I can. The thing I think is interesting about that is how easy it is for people to suddenly slip into wanting to do extremely dark things to their family and neighbors. Knowing the full consequences of what they are, the full repercussions of the sort of the chain of events that are unfolding, it's just that when you create the right environment to do so, all of this stuff ends up coming out. You know, the sailing witch trials is another example, right? These people, in exactly the same way,

you would get these false accusations flying around all over the place because it's like, oh, you know, I quite want to have my neighbor's horse. So I'll make this false accusation and then I can make a sweet thing. Yeah, and if you just try to take the horse yourself, that's a big risk. But if you can diffuse that risk amongst everyone else and amongst the authorities and the police and the clergy, then it feels a little less bad. The guilt isn't all on you. And you do that through a public accusation. Now that horse should be mine and like everyone kind of agrees.

So I don't really feel bad that I had to call you a witch to do it. Because I was only one of the 12 people who threw you in the river, okay? I'm only a 12th response. Exactly. Does that make you worry there a little bit? bit, but actually there are all of these people who would willingly throw you under a bus literally as well as metaphorically and only don't because it's not easy to. That does sort of make me worry about society more broadly and generally.

I guess, yeah. I'm trying to think. Like, yes, but I've always lived in that world. I don't know. That's the way we all are. I don't know a world where like God shows up in the courtroom and is like, nah, it didn't happen. And we all go, oh, okay. So there's always that fear, not just of a false accusation that's made on purpose as revenge, but just an innocently mistaken accusation. Like someone thought they saw you do something. Right. Totally. They're not even confident in it, but it's the only lead anyone has. And gosh, that can be pretty bad. Right. Another really famous case. Lots of these are from America. I wonder why that is.

The daycare satanic panic. Do you know about the satanic panic? Yeah, I was a kid during it. Were you? Well, yeah. It was like every song had some kind of satanic message. Every act of vandalism a teenager did at night was because of Satan. And I thought it was going to be a much bigger part of my adult life.

And it just isn't. It was this really strange panic where suddenly everyone you don't, know is likely to be influenced by some satanic motivation. So part of the reason why this started was that there was a preschool case. So this is McMartin preschool. It's in Manhattan Beach. And it was this family-owned preschool. There was this little two-year-old boy who was attending that preschool in 1983.

And one day he came home and he had like, he had a bit of a sort of a little, you know, a school saw bum basically. And the mum was like, what on earth is going on here? And he said that the male provider of the nursing home had taken his temperature by rectally, right, by using a thermometer. And the boy's mum was like really worried that her son had been sexually abused. So she goes into the police. And then when the police interview the boy, he doesn't say anything about there being any abuse or anything. but the mum is like, no, no, no, when we were at home, he told me, and I'm telling you for sure,

this is something that has happened. So what ends up happening, the local police who, you know, took her at her word, as I think you should with an accusation that's that serious, they then send letters to 200 parents across the preschool asking them to, like, question their children. The adults are there trying to get the children to say, the things that they're looking for. And so the children are like, okay, well, maybe it was, maybe it's something like this,

maybe it's something like this, sort of coming up with, with all of these different kind of things until they've noticed that the adults are sort of latching onto something, at which point they start expanding their stories. And very soon, there's these like incredible stories of animal sacrifices and blood drinking

and cannibalism and live burials that are coming out from these children, not using those words, but those words are sort of interpreted by, the adults who are who are then questioning them. Then it just sort of takes off and has a life of its own. You've got stories of like mutilation of corpses and secret rooms and trapdoors and like devils and witches.

And in the end, the law enforcement identified 350 children as victims, all seven of these providers of this nursing facility as though they're these like satanic ritual abusers. By the way, none of this happened. None of this happened. Yeah. I mean, there's a reason I wasn't allowed to wear black shoes, right? Black sneakers, you know, my mom wouldn't get me because I think it's smacked of the devil and being a part of some organization that was satanic or siding with the devil. Yeah. And it was like, oh, wow, it's pretty scary. And now I own black shoes. And I'm like, no, actually, I just got black shoes. shoes. Hang on. Let me see your t-shirt today. This looks looking pretty satanic from here. This is an Art Deco depiction of Rutherford's alpha particle experiment on the gold atoms. That's pretty cool. Or is it, right? What does it really mean? What sinister motives are there here? I mean, there's something really special about that time period. The 90s were a time where,

first of all, information could spread really quickly. It had for a while. But, we had suddenly like an interstate highway system and access to cars that allowed people to move around a lot, that allowed ideas to spread a lot, but we weren't yet at a place where security had caught up. You couldn't have CCTV cameras everywhere. You didn't have keypad locks and everything recorded. So you also find like a lot of serial killers in that zone in the second half of the 1900s where people can kind of go around and quickly evade, but they can also kind of blend into these big cities. And yet you don't quite have the DNA technology or security camera technology that would make catching them easy. Same goes for a lot of these

accusations that are sort of hard to prove, but they're also hard to disprove. There's a human tendency to take the safe route and just assume that the worst is true because, you know, then I won't feel guilty. Right. And this, I think you're absolutely right that you're also, you're tapping into people's really darkest fears. This is also a period of time where you move away from single income households to two parents being at work.

You have just the idea of sort of daycare centers is actually a pretty new phenomenon at this point. That's right. You've got mothers who are dropping off their tiny little babies. and really worried about the environment that they're going to be in. And you kind of put those two things together, the underlying fear of society, along with the opportunity, there's no wonder that something like this really ends up catching.

Exactly, right. Yeah, I mean, shared childcare, aloe parenting is as old as our species. But for the people caring for your child to be essentially strangers, employees, as opposed to aunts and uncles and neighbors, that really hit like a major inflection point around that time. And so those fears come about because it's really different. We didn't grow up prepared for that. And so we react to it.

And sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it goes overboard. So, okay, if this is the reason why false accusations start, sometimes for personal gain, sometimes because of misunderstanding, sometimes because of personal fear. The question is, how do they? then end up taking hold? If they're so obviously wrong, if they're not grounded in fact, how can it possibly be that suspicion can end up becoming certainty? How does it end up that people are completely sure this person must be guilty or this particular thing must be happening?

And this is where the fact that humans are a complete wobbly mess of biases really ends up coming into play. So probably the first thing is confirmation bias. As soon as you've decided that somebody is guilty, everything they subsequently do, and then, you're going to, and then, up confirming your suspicion. Yeah. And the problem is, is that the way that people act when they're innocent and defending themselves can look a lot like the way that guilty people act. Yeah.

Going red in the face. All of those kind of things would be equally as true of somebody who had been accused incorrectly as it might be of somebody who actually was genuinely guilty. Yeah, it's hard to tease out that difference. and a lot of the like clues that you hear about are really soft. It's like, oh, watch if their eyes look to the left. And it's like, oh, brother, you know, there's a lot of other reasons why someone's eyes might do what they're doing. You've got that confirmation bias and you've got even just the suspicion is the kind of thing that'll snowball, creates this feedback loop.

As soon as Richard Jewel is called a person of interest, he becomes more. He hasn't even been accused of it yet. And by the way, person of interest is an incredibly euphemistic phrase. Like, you're just of interest. We are interested in you. We're not saying anything else. But yet, through this, like, euphemistic treadmill, that word comes to mean he did it. Right?

Suddenly, just the littlest shifts in how language is used change how everyone approaches the question and the guy's guilt. And suddenly this guy's like, whether he did it or now, he kind of needs to be punished. He needs to be off the streets, right? These kind of things spiral. I was thinking about Amanda Knox here. Do you remember when Amanda Knox was arrested, she in the, when she was in the police station, she was doing things like handstands and cartwheels. And even the police in that situation were saying, okay, well, that's the behavior of a guilty person.

There's no way an innocent person would be doing this. Except the problem is that you can't actually decide what is guilty behavior and what is not guilty behavior because different people behave in different ways. That's right. Yeah, we are all different people. There might be a way Hannah behaves when she's guilty. And there might be a way I behave when I'm guilty. But there isn't a way humans behave when they're guilty. And so, right, you try to find patterns and come to conclusions maybe more quickly than you should. So the confirmation bias in the case of Richard Jewel is like, okay, well, he was a guy who found the bomb and he helped to clear the area. And that, on the one hand, is like, oh, well, that's just somebody who's doing their job and trying to help. Exactly. But as soon as you decide that he is actually the bomber, well, then it's like, well, he wanted to be the hero. So he knew exactly what was going on.

He planted the bomb in the first place so that he could discover it and receive praise. after the bombing, he said that he would like to, you know, he wanted to meet President Clinton. He didn't mind the media attention. And then as soon as people decided that, okay, no, actually he's guilty, they recast that same behavior of him being like, oh, you know, thank you for like treating me like a hero, as the possible motive that he was like, oh, no, he actually wanted to meet Clinton all along. That was the reason why he did it in the first place. There was also the fact that actually nobody remembered selling him.

many bomb-making materials at a hardware store. They'd sort of asked around. But people managed to explain that way by saying, well, okay, you know, a salesperson wouldn't remember every sale. Maybe he was sort of covering his tracks. Maybe he was doing it in different places. And that I think is like really demonstrates this idea of confirmation bias that even when you don't have supporting evidence, you can sort of see that there's a way around to make it compatible with your theory, where you're saying, this is what I think happened and making the evidence fit the story rather than the other way around. I think there's probably a kind of bias we have where an accusation or a theory is convincing and then the lack of evidence against it doesn't change how we feel.

I'm bringing this up off of a specific example I heard from some lawyer who was like, you know, anything you say to the police is usually. bad. Even if you're completely innocent and you didn't do it and you've got an alibi and you can say, I couldn't have done it. I was across town getting gas at a gas station at that time. You've opened yourself up to this question of, okay, we'll prove it. And you're like, okay, so you go to the gas station and they don't have any security

cam footage because they weren't working that day and you don't have the receipt. Now it's actually suspicious that you can't prove your story. And if you had just said nothing, you would have been better off. Yeah. I think it's called belief perseverance. So you've got this belief and it's just really hard for that belief to be changed. It's easier to keep structuring the same belief than it is to change it, which makes sense. It's a big cognitive demand to change your beliefs.

But it's almost trivial and automatic to reinforce your current beliefs. Right. To reverse engineer whatever evidence comes forward as, as. as a way to support the thing that you've already decided. There's also informational cascades that happen here as well. When you've got one individual person who is being accused, one person has a hunch, another person has a hunch, there's a little bit of information here,

there's a little bit of information over there. And then all of a sudden, it looks like this overwhelming amount of data and evidence, despite the fact that actually individually, none of these things are particularly important or credible. Right. I mean, I think is something that happens in, particular with like the TikTok swarms when there is um uh you know as a missing person or a murder

and then the TikTok detectives want to try and solve the case this happened with the Boston bomber I think didn't it yeah where people on Reddit believe that they had like pinpointed the the culprit despite it being completely wrong hello the rest is science listeners this is Richard Amarina here from The Rest is Entertainment. And right now, we are obsessed with Hannah Fry's performance on the celebrity traitors. She is not allowed to say a word about the show and I've told her not to until the final airs. But Richard and I have no such restraint. Exactly.

Every Friday at 10pm, we are dropping a debrief on everything that's happened in the castle that week. Every twist, every betrayal and every half-baked fan theory, we're going to break it all down and try and work out if Hannah's actually got what it takes to win that crown. That's every Friday, 10pm on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search the rest is entertainment. Can't wait. From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. On October 14th, the Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy.

That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? What am I losing my mind? Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like mortal jeopardy. Streaming October 14th.

Only on Disney Plus. Have you been falsely accused of anything? Um, let's see. You know, I've been falsely accused of being the most handsome man in the world. I'm not, despite how many people keep saying it. No, um, I'd say the sort of false. accusation that I get the most, and it's not even that many people, but it's accusations that the Mindfield show was fake. And I don't know how to prove this because, I mean, all I can say

is, well, look, we're just replicating things that have been shown in study after study, after experiment, after experiment. But there are people who are like really certain of things. They'll say things like a website where TV shows are reviewed, and Mindfield has one review there where a guy is like, this is obviously fake, because you have to get everyone to sign a release before you even film. They all knew they were in an experiment. And I'm like, no, that's not how it works. People sign the release afterwards. They'd sign one before. Like, I acknowledge I'm going to be recorded, blah, blah, blah.

Here are the known risks and da-da-da-da-da. and then after they've gone through the entire experience, we say, okay, so here's what happened and here's why the results are really fascinating and insightful and you shouldn't be embarrassed. You have really helped us demonstrate and understand human behavior. And now here's a release and they can say no. And the people who are in the show all said, yeah, I want to be in. And I don't know. Do I need to just like constantly get on camera and explain why things happened?

it can get confusing because there are moments where the editors would edit things and like switch moments in time or jump through moments of time. So someone's cup is on a table and in the next shot it's not. And so that's proof that it's all, they're all just actors. Instead of like cheaply hiring people for, you know, a hundred bucks a day to come to a study, instead we like hired actors and had them learn lines and make human behavior. And I'm like, no, the editor just cut that moment when they put the cup down on the floor. because it was boring.

Or they wanted to heighten the tension, and so they made that moment last a little bit longer, and that's why you see that one scene twice. It's very frustrating. I would have no interest in having people pretend to do what we already know humans already do naturally. That's the only one I can think of right now where I'm like, oh, please, guys. I think that's it. Humans are an absolute mess. Like, we cannot make consistent, unbiased decisions for Toffee.

Like, we're all over the shop. You really don't have to try very hard to get some really interesting results. No, and we like to feel like we have access to special information. Like, I know that you did something wrong because I can see through your lies. And if you, no matter how hard you try to explain all of their issues, it's more important to them to have that knowledge and to be right about something that's being hidden from them. And so anything you do to try to help bring people towards the truth is just going to get turned into more armor for their position. Their identity is wrapped up in this accusation they've made. The other problem with all of this is that once this idea starts to take hold, once you know, you've got belief persistence and confirmation bias and informational cascades, there's also the problem that people are not very good at sticking their neck out and disagreeing with mobbed.

mentality. So there's a really amazing experiment that I think demonstrates this really nicely. This is in Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. They got a group of participants to do what they thought was a vision test. And what you do is you show them three lines and they're obviously different lengths and then you ask them which one matches a target line. Okay. And I mean, as with all psychology experiments, it's like the actual test is not the thing that they think is because what ends up happening is that everyone else in the group, apart from the subject themselves, has been told to give the wrong answer. So it's really simple, right? There's one line that very clearly matches the target line and two that clearly don't. And yet, when everyone in the room

is like, oh, well, that one matches, that the people who are being tested start to doubt what they themselves seeing. And in fact, actually, in this particular experiment, which was mostly in the 1950s, three quarters of the participants went along with the obviously false consensus at least once. They're like, they're not able to say, guys, I don't think that that's, I don't think that that's right. Yeah, yeah. And that wasn't just one study. That's been repeated over and over again, including in an episode of Mindfield. Oh, really? We did the Ash conformity study, and it's just amazing to see it happen. I mean, I think so much is going on in people's minds.

But, yeah, we brought in, like, you know, one person, and we had five employees of the production pretend to also be showing up to do it. And they would lie and say, oh, well, obviously, line C is the same length as the target. And we would do close-up secret cam footage of the subject who's like, wait, what? And I think sometimes they just thought, maybe I misunderstood the insubstead. instructions and they would just go along with what all the Confederates were saying because I think in some ways they thought, oh, does it really matter? You know, and they thought, oh, maybe I don't get it or maybe I'm not seeing this right, but I don't want to, I don't want the attention of standing out.

So I'm just going to go along with it. And when that happens on a TV show, it's funny. But when it happens in real life, it can be bad. And I think that actually, in a lot of ways, social media makes this whole thing way worse. So there is this article called Moral Outrage in the Digital Age by this psychologist called Molly Crockett. She says obviously outrage is like as old as civilization itself. But she kind of makes this argument about how digital media fuels it. I mean, look, this is not a surprise, right?

I think all of us have had this literal experience of this. There was one point a few years ago, maybe eight years ago, where I had this realization that I think that I was getting addicted to outrage. that I just loved the storms that would happen on like Twitter so much that I was like constantly looking for like the feeling of being outrage. But anyway, her conclusion in this paper are that what, what social media does is it inflates the sort of triggering stimuli of outrage, right? That you're like, okay, this person has done this. It's just so easy to find even the smallest little thing.

And then it's really easy for that to start. spread, but it also reduced the costs. So if you are anonymous on the internet, it's really easy to join in on a pile on, whereas actually in person, you might be, you might be more cautious about stopping that. But then also that it amplifies the personal benefits of it, that people have made their entire careers just by being outrageous and doing outrageous things and making outrageous accusations of other individuals. I do think all of that stuff is really no Yes, and one thing I've been thinking about for years is the fact that the costs of accusations and gossip are lower online. But also, there's a big difference between real life and online when it comes to showing disagreement and disengagement.

Okay, so if someone is pushing a theory that is wrong and I don't see it, well, then I don't. leave a comment. But if I do see it and I don't like it, I swipe away and I haven't left a comment. So the difference between he hasn't heard and he disagrees is nothing. There's no way to show I don't like this. But by watching it, by having it show up in my feet, I've given it a view. So like, no matter what my reaction is, I'm just giving engagement. Whereas in the real world, If someone is acting in a way that is antisocial or dangerous, we have so many, even like, paralinguistic and like body language type reactions that everyone picks up on. And those don't come through on the internet where we're disembodied and all we have is,

did he leave a comment or not? Instead, someone's acting in a way that is negatively valence to everyone around. they move away, they change the subject, the way they look, their body posture, all of that conveys that message. But online, there aren't that many ways to do it. You're either saying I disagree in a comment or you're saying I do agree and it's just so much more flat that we lose a lot of those more subtle, more like non-consciously convincing ways of showing how we feel. It's the nuances, right? But then I also think that in that sort of flattened, simplified space, I think that there's very limited ways for you to demonstrate who you are as a person. And I think actually a lot of the time being visibly outraged is like individual signaling to others what kind of person they are, right? It's like them sort of like framing themselves.

I mean, we're sort of moving slightly away from false accusations here into outrage, but I think that the two are ultimately connected in a lot of ways. So actually, on this topic, there's a study that came out of Northwestern University about how outrage ends up helping misinformation to spread online. And they did this analysis that found that posts from misinformation sources were more likely than those from trustworthy news organizations to elicit this sort of moral outrage and that people were more likely to reshare them

without reading them. So it's like the act of being outraged, the act of like turning against a particular individual group of people is the thing that ends up being the sort of social cohesion that allows things to spread more quickly and easily. But on the flip side of this, if you get too much exposure to outrage-inducing content, it means that it creates fatigue in people that just makes them not want to participate in political action.

And I think if I'm honest with you, that's sort of where I am right now. I'm obsessed with politics. I'm like nonstop gobble up politics. But I think that I am fatigued by the amount of outrage that there is around it. Yeah, there's only so long you can feel so powerless before you're like, all right, I'm actually going to move on to something that I can control. And maybe that's my own life, my own. own neighborhood, you know? Yeah. Like, I'm just, I can't just be unsettled about stuff that actually doesn't change my day. Right. And didn't you say this before that like the amount of

information that you're getting about the wider world is way more than we ever should have than we ever, ever were designed to hear? Well, yeah, I don't know what we were designed for, but I can certainly say that like we still live in the telegraph age. You know, the smartphone is just a better telegraph. That difference between before the telegraph and after is basically a bigger deal than BC AD, right? It was, can I know what's going on a thousand miles away as though I'm there or not? Suddenly, like, you need to be worried about the fact that something happened in Ohio. Yet it doesn't actually, knowing about that, doesn't change your plans for the day or give you information to solve a problem.

you're required to solve or anything. It's just a brand new kind of life that we can live in what I call a heterotopia. It's another place. And it's this place that's on screens and in our minds. And we can be really active there and we can face a lot of challenges and we can get a lot of, you know, meaning from it. And yet it's a different place. It is. It's very much a different place. Can I ask, I forgot to ask, have you ever been falsely accused of something? Michael, I'm an absolute goody Toschase. Are you joking me? No, but that's a perfect person to falsely accuse.

You're right. People have accused me of the scam-demic. Do you remember I told you this story? Oh, yeah. Yeah, people have accused me of being caught. That you got so many things right. It's quite convenient that I made a program about a flu-like pandemic. spreading through the world about a year before it actually happened.

And you know what? When it came to that one, that spread like wildfire online. And I just didn't bother to defend it. Because I knew all of this stuff about false accusations, there comes a point where really nothing you say will be used to reverse people's opinions. That's right. Yeah. The innocence, irrespective of whether it's true or not, will end up looking like guilt.

I think the other thing that's part of this is that people think that they're really good at telling when somebody is lying. But they're really not, right? Like all the evidence says that we absolutely cannot tell at all. There's these meta studies that look at our ability to distinguish lies from honesty. And actually on average, we get it correct 54% of the time, which is, you know, it's a coin flip. It's a coin flip. We're inclined more towards truth. We tend to believe people, but we definitely believe that we are much better at detecting lies than we actually are.

Yep. And I can only imagine how much worse this would be if it's not only the internet and random strangers on the internet, but law enforcement too, who are really behind this false accusation. Oh my gosh. I mean, imagine being the woman whose baby was eaten by a dingo. Right. Right. classic case of like we all thought it was just hilarious what she was saying. And it certainly didn't happen. This is a story that I don't know enough details about. I did watch a documentary about it years ago.

That whole phrase, a dingo ate my baby, became a catchphrase. And everyone thought, no, she did it. She committed the crime. Most horrific crime. We find out, of course, much later, that it probably actually was a dingo. I don't know if we all kind of bond during a pile on and gravitate towards the more dramatic norm-violating versions of stories. Like if a dingo did it, then it's just kind of sad and we don't want to live in a world where that happens. But if it was this one particular mother, oh, we can all hate her together and become more close.

So the false accusation grows. Right. Unites the rest of us while leaving this one individual feeling. really isolated. The story with Richard Jewel is he spent 88 days in total as a suspect and nearly three months he had this media siege. There were reporters who were camped outside of the flat that he shared with his mother. There was the FBI. He was searching their home. He were taking their belongings. He had his face on every single news channel. This guy had done nothing wrong by the way. You know, late night comedians were making him a punchline. He was in the end, he was formally cleared

in October 1996. But by that, point, I mean, the damage had been done. All of his life had already completely fallen apart. In the end, he sued lots of media organizations, NBC, CNN, New York Post. People didn't apologize. I mean, not that the apologies would undo it either. It just, he said also, by the way, that the settlements that he got from suing people, 73% of it went to his lawyers and to tax. Wow. use some of it to buy his mother a place to live. But, you know, he did the cases because he really wanted to make sure that the truth was told.

Yeah. The thing is, is that the repercussions of forced accusations could be really, really harsh. So there was one study where they had 30 participants who had been on the receiving end of a force accusation. And many of them felt that they had permanent changes to their personality as a result of it, right? anxiety and paranoia, I think it ends up making you just extremely mistrustful of other people if you end up being on the receiving end of this kind of thing. Well, yeah, and you know what? It's almost like Russian nesting dolls because the person who makes an accusation

can then themselves get accused of offering a false accusation. So now they're being accused of something that they may not have. done. And everyone just winds up getting accused and feeling guilty and having guilt, you know, suspected of them, even if they initially were the ones who were assigning guilt. It's a mess. And that is why I think erring on the side of properly investigating accusations, but innocent until proven guilty. I think that that is the, that is the sensible way forward for things. Yes. There's a reason that method is so famous. Right, there really is. And I think the really key thing about the dual story is that it was leaked to the press. And once it gets leaked to the press, this thing can take on a life of its own. And I think this is, you know, as you say, right, there is a reason why law enforcement don't release the names of suspects unless they absolutely have to. They try and keep things, you know, under wraps for as long as possible. Because you don't want to be in a situation where you are doing this to an innocent party, where you are essentially convicting an innocent party,

without trial or without due process. That's right. And on the flip side, you don't want to be in a situation where you're not taking accusation seriously and that somebody could be doing something like having a satanic ritual with children across an entire country simultaneously and get away with it because you don't want to say the wrong thing.

That's what I always say. I think here's the thing about all of this, right? I think that this is something that culture is completely fascinated by. I think the number of crime documentaries, the number of like murder investigations, the number of dramatic stories and novels that have been written about this idea of like who done it and accusations and false accusations and so on and so on and witch hunts and everything, I think this is a really enduring part of our culture. It can take quite a dark turn.

Have you come across the game, Mafia, Michael? It sounds familiar, but no, tell me. It's sort of a dinner party game where you have a large group of people and you have a small number of people who have complete information. They're part of the mafia. They know who each other are, but they are unknown to the rest of the rest of the table. Okay. And over the course of the game, essentially, people have to try and work out who they are. So the whole thing was set up as like a psychological experiment to see if a small number of people could control a small number of people could control a situation.

situation just by allowing misinformation and false accusations to spread out amongst other people. This is like, we're talking, you know, Soviet Russia. This is the point of when this was made. It was in the Psychology Department of Moscow State University in 1987. This particular game, which I think demonstrates all of these points so acutely, ended up sort of spreading like wildfire outside of the classroom, outside of the original setting. No publisher, no advertising campaign, just people playing this game and passing it on, which I think does demonstrate just how intrigued we are by these ideas as a sort of cultural phenomenon. That's right. It happens on the playground every day, and sometimes it's about nothing. But I think almost all the time,

it's rarely mainly about justice and the truth. It's about identity. identity. It's about expressing who we all are. Hey, in that crime story, I think that it was so and so. And that shows something about me and how I think and how I feel. And I'm on this team or I'm on that team. And very few people are on the team of truth. Right. They're on the team of these values, this perspective. And it's how we not only show who we are, but it's how we figure out who we are. tell you what, Michael, there are some people on the team of truth. And it's us and the people who listen to the rest of the sites, because that's what we're here for. We're bringing you truth bombs, left, right and center twice a week. It's limited to your screens. And we will be back later this week with yet another truth bomb for you with field notes coming up.

So, don't finger Richard Jewel over these truth bombs. It's 100% Han and I. We deserve the blame and the credit. Michael, you know that that means something quite different in the UK. What? Fingered? I live in a 1930s pulp comic. I don't know what you're talking about. We'll see you next time. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. On October 14th, the Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real.

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