You can be fooled, I can be fooled, we can all be fooled. It is inevitable that at some point like me you also will have believed something and then later discovered it was not actually true at all.
How did you then respond to that reveal?
Like most you would have changed you mind and rejected what was exposed as a lie. However, not everybody behaves like that. Some will reject the reveal and instead stick with the lie?
Why?
We all know that we live in a world where people are believing, not just spreading, but believing super bizarre misinformation that is demonstrably false. This caught the interest of several social psychologists who study political psychology and how people reason about reality. The specific example was the truly whacky belief that 5G causes COVID-19. To dig into such thinking and to explore this specific example to try and understand what was going on, they surveyed 5,535 people during the pandemic across eight countries.
They got an answer, and so last Aug they published the results of their study.
What did they discover?
The title of their paper is the reveal.
Published in the Journal of Social Psychology, it is titled “Symbolic show of strength: a predictor of risk perception and belief in misinformation”
The essence of it is this, some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods.
This is a fascinating new insight.
What was well understood before this is that our political leanings can and do influence our beliefs. Beyond that, what can also influence our beliefs is our style of thinking. Humans will sometimes respond emotionally and so what feels right tends to lead to a belief. At other times humans can be more analytical. We all tend to do both, but for each of us as individuals we either lean more into one than the other.
However, beyond all that, what this new study reveals is that for some people there is something else going on.
People who looked upon actions as either a strength or a weakness tended to be the same people who were the most likely to believe weird and blatantly false COVID misinformation.
As you look around, what you often can see are people taking this stance – “This aligns with my political team. Therefore, I believe it, no matter how dumb or transparently wrong it is.“. You can perhaps conclude that they are just stupid. However tempting that thought is, you should pause it, because you can now gain a deeper insight into what is actually happening via this new study.
What is in play appears to be stronger than “This is my tribe“, or just gullibility. As a reader of this posting on Medium you are most probably interested in facts, truth, science, reality, and learning new things, but not everybody thinks like that at all. What the researchers encountered were not people who thought about COVID and how the politics they adhered to played into it all, but rather these were people who operated by considering how other people would see them – their actions were driven by their need to be seen as strong and not weak, “Truth” played a minor role.
If they caved to outside influence, “You need to be vaccinated“, “wear masks“, etc… they considered that as something that would present them as weak, and so they would push back and lean into doing stuff they believed would make them appear as strong.
This enabled them to look blatant misinformation in the face and embrace it – Thinking “I don’t care what they say, I’m strong and this is my truth.“
They feel like they’re winning by endorsing misinformation because when they do that, they believe that they are showing strength.
Even if they could be better, more healthy, more well, by engaging in these practices, the need to not be seen as psychologically weak dominates. The thought is that those that are weak minded follow the deep state or “the enemy”, hence the embrace of all the crazy stuff because it makes them feel strong.
What Else?
It also appears to be something that explains why people like Trump can be so effective when they use misinformation. This is because there is a certain segment of a population who symbolically want to show that they’re psychologically quote, strong, not weak. They feel that they do this by taking a “I believe him” stance. They sincerely believe that he has the answer, he is strong, and all of these authorities, all of these other groups, are misleading them.
Let’s work a quick example.
In August 2025, not too long ago, we got the claim by Trump that crime in Washington was at an all time high. The media was like, hell no, and so lots of Fact Check pieces were published. But you still saw people going, yes, it is, yes, it is. They were thinking, “He knows I don’t, I don’t care what the data shows”.
Some people may also view their favorite dissembler’s claims as provocative trolling, but, given the link between this mindset and authoritarianism, they want those far-fetched claims acted on anyway. The deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, for example, can be the desired end goal, even if the offered justification is a transparent farce.
When the Edge Lords (the whacky internet trolls) start pushing narratives that are overtly and demonstrably false, what they are saying is embraced, not as literal truths, but as symbolic.
It is apparently this that is having real consequences.
Why does understanding this matter?
At the moments when you come face to face with crazy, you might be tempted to think that those making wild claims are just missing a bit of information, and so you engage by tossing facts at them to debunk the whacky claims. What you will encounter is a complete immunity to facts. That’s because the issue is not a lack of understanding, but something else.
If we really do understand what is actually happening and why, then you are one step closer to having an insight that enables you to hold conversations with people in a manner that then gains traction.
Easy tempting answers include “They are stupid“, or “They are ignorant“. If that is not what is going on at all, then any remedies designed to target “stupid” and “ignorant” will be utterly ineffective and so you will end up becoming very frustrated.
If you are having a discussion with somebody who uses symbolic thinking, then attempts to debunk what is deemed to be symbolic to them is perceived as a weakness, and so their rejection is perceived as a strength.
It is possible that symbolic, but not exactly true, beliefs have some downstream benefit, such as serving as negotiation tactics, loyalty tests, or a fake-it-till-you-make-it long game that somehow, eventually, becomes a reality. – Randy Stein and Abraham Rutchick (Authors of the published paper).
Further Reading
- The paper – Published in the Journal of Social Psychology in Aug 2025, and titled “Symbolic show of strength: a predictor of risk perception and belief in misinformation”
- The authors have also published an arrticle within The Conversation on Oct 15 titled “Winning with misinformation: New research identifies link between endorsing easily disproven claims and prioritizing symbolic strength”