Misinformation and Mass Audiences

Information, a series edited by Andrew Dillon

Misinformation and Mass Audiences

EDITED BY BRIAN G. SOUTHWELL, EMILY A. THORSON, AND LAURA SHEBLE

University of Texas Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Southwell, Brian G. (Brian Glen), 1974–, editor. | Thorson, Emily A., editor. | Sheble, Laura, editor.

Title: Misinformation and mass audiences / edited by Brian G. Southwell, Emily A. Thorson, and Laura Sheble.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | Series: Information | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017025953

ISBN 978-1-4773-1455-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1456-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1457-9 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1458-6 (non-library e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Mass media—Audiences. | Communication. | Common fallacies—Social aspects. | Deceptive advertising—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC P91.27 .M57 2018 | DDC 302.23—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025953

doi:10.7560/314555

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Misinformation among Mass Audiences as a Focus for Inquiry

BRIAN G. SOUTHWELL, EMILY A. THORSON, AND LAURA SHEBLE

PART I: Dimensions of Audience Awareness of Misinformation

ONE: Believing Things That Are Not True: A Cognitive Science Perspective on Misinformation

ELIZABETH J. MARSH AND BRENDA W. YANG

TWO: Awareness of Misinformation in Health-Related Advertising: A Narrative Review of the Literature

VANESSA BOUDEWYNS, BRIAN G. SOUTHWELL, KEVIN R. BETTS, CATHERINE SLOTA GUPTA, RYAN S. PAQUIN, AMIE C. O’DONOGHUE, AND NATASHA VAZQUEZ

THREE: The Importance of Measuring Knowledge in the Age of Misinformation and Challenges in the Tobacco Domain

JOSEPH N. CAPPELLA, YOTAM OPHIR, AND JAZMYNE SUTTON

FOUR: Measuring Perceptions of Shares of Groups

DOUGLAS J. AHLER AND GAURAV SOOD

FIVE: Dimensions of Visual Misinformation in the Emerging Media Landscape

JEFF HEMSLEY AND JAIME SNYDER

PART II: Theoretical Effects and Consequences of Misinformation

SIX: The Effects of False Information in News Stories

MELANIE C. GREEN AND JOHN K. DONAHUE

SEVEN: Can Satire and Irony Constitute Misinformation?

DANNAGAL G. YOUNG

EIGHT: Media and Political Misperceptions

BRIAN E. WEEKS

NINE: Misinformation and Science: Emergence, Diffusion, and Persistence

LAURA SHEBLE

TEN: Doing the Wrong Things for the Right Reasons: How Environmental Misinformation Affects Environmental Behavior

ALEXANDER MAKI, AMANDA R. CARRICO, AND MICHAEL P. VANDENBERGH

PART III: Solutions and Remedies for Misinformation

ELEVEN: Misinformation and Its Correction: Cognitive Mechanisms and Recommendations for Mass Communication

BRIONY SWIRE AND ULLRICH ECKER

TWELVE: How to Counteract Consumer Product Misinformation

GRAHAM BULLOCK

THIRTEEN: A History of Fact Checking in U.S. Politics and Election Contexts

SHANNON POULSEN AND DANNAGAL G. YOUNG

FOURTEEN: Comparing Approaches to Journalistic Fact Checking

EMILY A. THORSON

FIFTEEN: The Role of Middle-Level Gatekeepers in the Propagation and Longevity of Misinformation

JEFF HEMSLEY

SIXTEEN: Encouraging Information Search to Counteract Misinformation: Providing Balanced Information about Vaccines

SAMANTHA KAPLAN

Conclusion: An Agenda for Misinformation Research

EMILY A. THORSON, LAURA SHEBLE, AND BRIAN G. SOUTHWELL

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This project reflects the work of many authors, both those listed formally and others who helped behind the scenes. Collectively, we would like to thank the external reviewers as well as the University of Texas Press for their enthusiastic help in constructing this volume, especially Robert Devens, Sarah McGavick, and Lynne Chapman, and series editor Andrew Dillon at the University of Texas, who with a light hand nurtured this project as it grew. Many thanks also to freelance copyeditor Tana Silva, indexer Lisa Rivero, and proofreader Melissa McGee Tullos for their outstanding work.

In addition, Brian is grateful for the ongoing patience and support of his family, including Jessica, Gavin, and Ellerie. Emily would like to thank her family and coeditors. Laura thanks her family and friends for their encouragement and uncanny ability to know perfectly just when to share a joke, a walk, a sandwich—and especially their time. We would also like to thank all who have contributed to our understanding of misinformation. Finally, we thank those who are reading these pages for your interest in joining this conversation.

INTRODUCTION

Misinformation among Mass Audiences as a Focus for Inquiry

BRIAN G. SOUTHWELL, EMILY A. THORSON, AND LAURA SHEBLE

Misinformation—both deliberately promoted and accidentally shared—is a noteworthy and perhaps inevitable part of the world in which we live. People likely have lied to one another for roughly as long as verbal communication has existed. Deceiving others can offer an apparent opportunity to gain strategic advantage, to motivate others to action, or even to protect interpersonal bonds. Moreover, people inadvertently have been sharing inaccurate information with one another for thousands of years. We currently live in an era of mass audiences, however, which means that the potential for immediate and widespread misinformation effects now looms larger than in the past. Yet in those same patterns of mass communication and facilitated peer-to-peer information spread might also be the seeds of misinformation correction over time. Investigating the spread and effects of misinformation is as compelling now as it has ever been in human history.

As a focus for research and debate, the phenomenon of misinformation crosses disciplinary bounds; misinformation exists in and across topical domains, from science to politics to consumer advertising, and can quickly spread through a range of media, including television, radio, and pixels shared via social media on the Internet. Understanding misinformation requires working at many levels of analysis, from the policy infrastructure for mass media content to individual information processing ability. Thoroughly understanding and addressing the proliferation, effects, and correction of misinformation calls for a multidisciplinary approach.

In assembling this collection of essays, we have brought together evidence and ideas from communication research, public health, psychology, political science, environmental studies, information science, and other literatures to explore what constitutes misinformation, how it spreads, and how best to counter it. We consider various angles, such as the extent to which audiences consciously notice misinformation, possibilities for audience deception, the ethics of satire in journalism and public affairs programming, the diffusion of rumors, the role of Internet search behavior, and the development of efforts such as fact-checking programs.

Curation of a broad sweep of ideas related to misinformation admittedly risks creation of a smorgasbord that lacks useful argument and thematic coherence. In light of that risk, we have organized contributions into three types of essays—conceptualization and measurement of individual engagement with misinformation, discussion of potential effects, and exploration of remedies—and also have accepted some framing assumptions and boundaries as to what we can discuss in this book and what is best left for future exploration. The consequence of that is a book that simultaneously reminds us that misinformation will continue to pose a dilemma for mass media systems for the foreseeable future and that there are ways we can address concerns. Below, we argue that misinformation exists, that it is problematic in the context of mass audiences and societies for particular reasons, and that the essays we have selected contribute in different ways to thought in this arena, an arena we claim is a worthy one for future inquiry, policy making, and public discussion.

What Is Misinformation?

Misinformation is concerning because of its potential to unduly influence attitudes and behavior, leading people to think and act differently than they would if they were correctly informed. In other words, we worry that misinformation (or false information) might lead people to hold misperceptions (or false beliefs) and that these misperceptions, especially when they occur among mass audiences, may have downstream consequences for health, social harmony, and political life.

Here we are assuming the common existence of mass audiences as Price (1992) and Webster and Phalen (1996) have defined them: more than a dyad or family unit and large enough that members do not necessarily communicate with one another directly but rather are connected primarily through exposure to a common message or piece of information. The possibility that mass audiences would consider false information to be true and would act on that false information implies a serious social problem, in that a mass communication system employs technology to simultaneously and immediately reach and connect large, heterogeneous groups of geographically dispersed people but cannot be fully protected against repeated and widespread claims that are not true. Given this potential problem, we are interested in the diffusion, use, persistence, and refutation of false information on a mass scale.

As Stahl (2006) has noted, critical theorists have raised important concerns about the possibility of information having objective truth value, concerns that complicate any distinction of misinformation and information on the basis of the former being false and the latter being true. On this point, nonetheless, thinking by Habermas (1984, 1987) is useful, as he focuses on a speaker’s intent to deceive and distinguishes between misinformation and disinformation. Habermas views truth as only possible collectively among people as a product of consensus; one’s collegial participation in collective understanding also matters. Misinformation from such a perspective, then, is contentious information reflecting disagreement between people, whereas disinformation is more problematic, as it involves the deliberate alienation or disempowerment of other people. Lewandowsky, Stritzke, Freund, Oberauer, and Krueger (2013) have carried forward this sense of disinformation as intentionally incorrect information.

We respectfully reject a worldview in which no degree of consensus between people is possible. Moreover, misinformation can occur and mislead those exposed, at least relative to what they would have believed if exposed to more complete and accurate information. Habermas’s triad of concepts—information, misinformation, and disinformation—offers a path forward and useful category distinctions for our discussion. If we allow a claim acknowledged by consensus to hold truth value, we then can position misinformation as a category of claim for which there is at least substantial disagreement (or even consensus rejection) when judged as to truth value among the widest feasible range of observers. That approach would include disinformation as a special type of misinformation distinguished by the intent of the promoter. From an ethical perspective, many people will worry most about active promotion of disinformation. Nonetheless, we will use the word misinformation throughout this book to acknowledge that false information can mislead people even if unintentionally promoted or mistakenly endorsed as being true. We acknowledge that such an approach opens the door for certain claims to evolve from being information to becoming misinformation and vice versa over time as a function of a society’s changing consensus. For our purposes, though, we will focus on misinformation as being claims to which mass audiences are exposed that do not actually enjoy universal or near-universal consensus as being true at a particular moment in time.

Mass Audience Exposure to Misinformation as a Cause for Concern

As argued elsewhere (Southwell & Thorson, 2015), at least three observations related to misinformation in the contemporary mass media environment warrant the attention of researchers, policy makers, and laypeople. First, people who encounter misinformation tend to believe it, at least at first. Second, many types of misinformation can appear in content available to mass audiences without being blocked or censored in many media systems. Third, countering misinformation once it has enjoyed wide exposure can be a resource-intensive effort.

What happens when people initially encounter misinformation holds tremendous importance for estimating the potential for subsequent problems. Although individuals generally have considerable routine experience encountering information now considered to be false, the question of exactly how—and when—we should label information as true or false has garnered philosophical debate. As outlined later in this volume, the dilemma is neatly summarized by a contrast between how the philosophers Descartes and Spinoza described human information engagement centuries ago with conflicting predictions that only recently have been empirically tested in robust ways. Descartes argued that a person accepts or rejects information only after considering its truth or falsehood; Spinoza argued that people accept all encountered information (or misinformation) by default and then subsequently verify or reject it through a separate process. Empirical evidence in recent decades has supported Spinoza’s account (Asp & Tranel, 2012; Gilbert, Krull, & Malone, 1990; Gilbert, Tafarodi, & Malone, 1993): people appear to encode all new information as if it were true, even if only momentarily, and later tag the information as being either true or false, a pattern that seems consistent with the observation that skepticism physically resides in a different part of the brain than the resources used in perceiving and encoding. We also know people judge source credibility as a heuristic cue in determining message acceptability and will turn to others for confirmation of the truth value of a claim (Lewandowsky, Ecker, Seifert, Schwarz, & Cook, 2012; Southwell, 2013). If the people surrounding someone tend to initially believe misinformation, then it raises the specter of network reinforcement of misinformation, meaning that misinformation could become even more difficult to debunk over time as the false claim becomes held by more and more people.

What about our claim that misinformation often can appear in electronic or print media without being preemptively blocked? One might consider the nature of regulatory structures in countries such as the United States: regulatory agencies tend to focus on post hoc detection of broadcast information. Organizations such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Federal Election Commission, and Food and Drug Administration offer considerable monitoring and notification functions, but these typically do not involve preemptive censoring. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising, for example, and has developed mechanisms such as the Bad Ad program through which people can report advertising in apparent violation of FDA guidelines on the presentation of drug risks and benefits (O’Donoghue et al., 2015). Such programs, though laudable and useful, do not guarantee that false advertising never appears on the airwaves and, moreover, do not prevent false news stories from appearing. In addition, even misinformation that is successfully corrected can continue to affect attitudes (Thorson 2015).

Lastly, countering misinformation with new information requires effort not only to develop new content that is understandable but also to ensure adequate message exposure. As Hornik (2002) has argued, a communication campaign can succeed or fail, at least in part, as a function of exposure or lack thereof. A campaign to correct misinformation, even if rhetorically compelling, requires resources and planning to accomplish the necessary reach and frequency. For corrective information to be persuasive it needs to be comprehended by audiences, which requires either effort to frame messages in ways that are understandable or effort to educate and sensitize audiences to the possibility of misinformation. That audiences might not be aware of the potential for misinformation also suggests the potential utility of media-literacy efforts as early as elementary school. Even with journalists, pundits, and scholars pointing to the phenomenon of fake news (Amarasingam, 2011), when scanning and processing information people often do not distinguish between demonstrably false stories and those based in fact.

As we consider mass audience vulnerability to misinformation, we should note how changes in electronic media have suggested to various scholars new possibilities for an individual actor to seed the world with falsehood. Social media offer the potential for a single person in a small town in South Dakota, for example, to reach people directly around the world with a video full of false information. Jenkins (2008) has noted the increased possibilities for user-produced content to be uploaded and shared with other individual information consumers. Such an emphasis on the potential for individual audience members’ agency relative to well-funded and centralized media institutions itself is not new, as media studies scholars have sought for decades to understand how people use media content for their own purposes in their daily lives (Brooker & Jermyn, 2003; Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1973–1974). Although these technology changes offer paths for problematic diffusion and dissemination of misinformation, evidence suggests that conventional media institutions still play a crucial role regarding message reach and immediacy in cases when information that first appears on a single page somewhere on the Internet subsequently diffuses widely (Weeks & Southwell, 2010). Although any one person can tell another a lie standing on a street corner, the dilemma of widespread misinformation among mass audiences should be understood as a problem of scope and scale not entirely appreciated from the vantage point of a single conversation.

An Overview of the Book

We have organized the chapters to address three important dimensions of misinformation that current and future scholars working in this arena will need to consider as we move forward to understand the phenomenon. First, we have asked a group of researchers to articulate what we know about conceptualizing and measuring audience awareness of misinformation. Second, we have gathered theoretical essays on the ways in which misinformation could have consequences for outcomes that matter to societal governance, individual decision making, and the everyday lives of audience members. Last, we approach the question of potential solutions and remedies for misinformation. Our particular focus on cognition, communication, and policy reflects concern for human engagement with misinformation and consequent potential for dysfunction in human societies. The human brain, interactions of people, and regulations and laws all shape problems and solutions in this arena and will continue to be relevant even as developing information technologies may automate some aspects of future detection, prevention, and correction of misinformation.

Our distinguished contributors for the first section of the book, on dimensions of audience awareness, cover a wide range of topical areas; as they do, some common themes surface about the importance of carefully defining variables and ensuring that measures are valid and reliable. Marsh and Yang approach this concern from a cognitive science perspective, highlighting human biases that favor misinformation acceptance to facilitate information-processing efforts. In this they set the stage for discussion of information encoding, forgetting, and retrieval in a manner that offers useful considerations for the rest of the chapters in the book. Boudewyns and colleagues consider consumer awareness in the specific context of health-related advertising. They find that although some researchers have investigated the prevalence and consequences of problematic claims in advertising, relatively little work to date sheds direct light on audience ability to detect deception. Cappella, Ophir, and Sutton argue for an approach to knowledge measurement that is relevant not only to the tobacco advertising research they have conducted but also to various situations in which knowing whether people hold specific factual claims in mind matters. They argue that many knowledge-based approaches to measuring audience exposure to misinformation are too narrow in scope and fail to take into account alternatives for measuring knowledge that would demonstrate manifestations of misinformation in relevant ways. Ahler and Sood also offer a measurement perspective, theirs grounded in thinking about political issues rather than health. Hemsley and Snyder extend our thinking to consider the possibility of visual misinformation, meaning the possibility for graphics and figures to lead people to misperceptions over and above verbal information. They argue that our current media environment offers numerous opportunities for visual deception.

As we turn to the theoretical consequences of misinformation, a group of experienced researchers reminds us that the ways in which we define and consider misinformation exposure and acceptance, as we do in the first part of the book, affect the range of possibilities for effects. Green and Donahue assess the potential effects of false information in news stories. They look at both immediate misinformation acceptance and persistence of such acceptance over time, and they usefully consider how what we know about audience transportation in the face of narratives helps account for such acceptance. Part of what is intriguing about Green and Donahue’s account is their consideration of news stories, a type of content in which misinformation sometimes can occur unintentionally. What about situations in which an author contorts or ignores some facts in an effort to shed light on truth? One can encounter such a situation with the use of satire and ironic humor. Young considers the possible effects of satire and irony and offers some answers to the question of whether satire and irony even should be categorized as misinformation. With the rise of political satire programs on channels such as Comedy Central and outlets such as the Onion in the United States and elsewhere, Young’s essay should be useful and timely for many years. Weeks focuses on the political realm in his essay on political misperceptions; he outlines factors such as the prevalence of ideologically oriented media content and the proliferation of social media tools as key considerations. Similarly, Maki, Carrico, and Vandenbergh look at misperceptions in the environmental arena. They specifically examine behavior with consequences for the environment, such as hand-washing and energy-saving practices, and they conclude that various fallacies sometimes have led to behavior at odds with recommended practice. Sheble helpfully reminds us that sometimes misperceptions about science stem not from explicit scientific fraud but by the diffusion of scientific information through social networks, a process that can result in the spread of misinterpretations over time.

The last section of the book addresses the difficult question of what, if anything, can be done to solve the problems caused by misinformation. Eliminating the existence of misinformation itself may be an impossible task in the media systems of relatively free and democratic societies, but nonetheless remedies may well exist to counter the effects of misinformation. Understanding whether such corrective efforts can work requires theory on the mechanisms of misinformation acceptance and rejection, for which we can draw on parts of section 1 as well as an artful review of mechanisms for corrective effect by Swire and Ecker. They note that many corrections are ineffective but also point out some reason for optimism. On a similar note, Thorson offers comparative evidence regarding the efficacy of various political campaign fact-checking approaches. She reports compelling reason for third-party fact-checking entities and journalists to get involved with the process, as she finds that adjudication by a fact-checking organization is more likely to offer corrective traction than simply allowing each side of a campaign to fact-check the other. Not all corrective efforts perform equally.

Corrective action is not limited to the political sphere. Researchers, professionals, and volunteers have attempted to develop remedies for misinformation for decades; we have even seen formal use of corrective remedies commissioned by agencies such as the FDA (Aikin et al., 2015). Our discussion would be incomplete without a look at the evolution of political campaign fact checking, and Poulsen and Young offer such an assessment with their discussion of the history of fact-checking initiatives related to political contests in the United States. At the same time, we can learn from the emerging literature on consumer product marketing as well. In this vein, Bullock reviews the consumer product label arena and concludes that regulations need to move beyond current practice to ideally combat fraudulent labeling claims. Strong remedies, however, also will face challenges from those who worry about censorship, as Kaplan notes in her review of efforts to provide balanced information about vaccine safety. The corrective-policy story is still being written, but our discussion nonetheless reveals some of the practical struggles that have been faced in balancing free speech concerns with worry about lying in stump speeches, political ads, or product promotion.

In the third section of the book, we again acknowledge the role that diffusion through networks can play in accounting for misinformation proliferation. A sociological approach not only highlights how information and misinformation move through communities but also might suggest yet another site for mitigation. In this regard, Hemsley’s chapter on what he calls middle-layer gatekeepers, people who serve as network hubs as information spreads from elite outlets to audience members with few followers, suggests a twist on the prospect of unmitigated diffusion as he notes the power of such information hubs to filter or stop the flow of misinformation. Such an approach harks back to the opinion-leader concept articulated by Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), offering not just a description of the flow of information but potential remedy for the spread of misperceptions.

Concluding Thoughts

The importance of misinformation as a concern has appeared to grow in recent years as technology affords quicker and more widespread dissemination of information and misinformation while various individual and societal constraints make the presentation and acceptance of misinformation common. At the same time, there is a growing interest in this dilemma from academics and policy makers, as evidenced by the contributions throughout this book. Moreover, technological change and human innovation have evolved in recent years to suggest some possibilities for immediate counterefforts that hold promise. One is real-time fact checking like the U.S. cable news channel CNN did for some presidential speeches in 2016; by immediately posting graphics noting claims that were not factually accurate, the organization leveraged technology to offer a potentially useful frame for viewers interested in the truth, a strategy recommended by Graves (2016). We live in a moment in which widespread misinformation is common. Yet, this is also a time in which many people are passionately developing potential solutions and remedies. The journey forward undoubtedly will be a long one. The way in which media systems have developed in many democratic societies inherently calls for both vulnerability to occasional misinformation and robust systems to detect and address it. Airtight preemptory systems, in fact, ultimately would be suffocating and unappealing. With this collection of essays, then, we hope to inform future efforts in what will be an ongoing struggle that stems from the nature of mass audience systems.

References

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PART I

Dimensions of Audience Awareness of Misinformation

ONE

Believing Things That Are Not True

A Cognitive Science Perspective on Misinformation

ELIZABETH J. MARSH AND BRENDA W. YANG

One of these rather silly anecdotes is an actual news story: some newer Canadian hundred-dollar bills smell like maple syrup; England is considering issuing a coin featuring the pop band One Direction; the U.S. Treasury recently introduced Perry the Pyramid, a terrifying one-eyed mascot for the dollar. Choosing the real story was the task of a college student who called in to the Bluff the Listener game on the National Public Radio program Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! (Danforth, 2013). He won the game by correctly selecting the true but rather obscure story about scented Canadian currency. How did the listener make this choice, given it was unlikely he had the relevant information in mind to make that decision?

In this chapter, we review the cognitive strategies and heuristics people use when deciding whether something is true. Our approach to understanding this issue is an experimental one, with the goal of isolating particular mechanisms that contribute to illusions of truth and the propagation of falsehoods. Many of the misconceptions covered in this volume are powerful precisely because they result from combinations of mental processes; there is not one simple trick to convincing people that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, that climate change is a hoax, or that other claims percolating through mass media are unsupported. Here, we consider how statements can be manipulated to seem more truthful than they are, why people unwittingly trust information from sources they initially knew to be unreliable, and how certain features of claims and arguments increase their persuasiveness; our objective in revealing these processes is to inform our overall understanding of misinformation in and out of the laboratory.

An Assumption of Truth

We begin with a very basic issue, namely, that even the most skeptical people have a bias toward accepting what they hear as true. This partly comes out of a need to have successful conversations; to do so, a person shapes what she says to be understood by those around her and assumes others are doing the same. Thus people expect what others say to be truthful, relevant, informative but not overly so, and clear (Grice, 1975). While these guidelines can be stretched or even broken—for instance, through deception, comedy, tall tales, and long academic lectures—they describe what people expect from others in everyday discourse; violations can be noticed in children as young as three years old (Eskritt, Whalen, & Lee, 2008). Our focus here is on the expectation that speakers are truthful. While this assumption is cognitively efficient compared to a strategy of evaluating each and every claim that comes one’s way, it can become problematic.

At issue is that people are often willing to be flexible in how they define truth. We found evidence for this in a study in which Stanford undergraduates tracked instances when they shared their memories with others (Tversky & Marsh, 2000). Over the course of four weeks, students submitted more than a thousand reports of such conversations. Consistent with conversational norms not to tell more than the listener needs to know, more than a third of retellings were reported to be selective in some way. For example, a student sharing a story about an annoying dinner guest focused on the guest’s criticisms of the cooking, omitting how the guest also commented on how another one of my appetizers was tasty. . . . I mentioned everything except the positive comment [when sharing this story]. . . . I was already too annoyed to let it change my reaction. Intriguingly, this speaker also labeled this retelling complete and accurate, presumably because the story was consistent with the overall theme of the event. In this study, a third of retellings containing distortions like omissions and elaborations were considered accurate by the teller. As Neisser (1981) has noted, truth and accuracy are