The Ubiquity of Fake News
In attempting to be vivid, storytellers often resort to fiction or fake news, thereby
providing amplified tales. The history of narratives shows that “fake news” is
not new. In fact, people have always liked amusing stories, and they spread
stories that they suspect are not true, as for example in urban legends. In fact,
people often spread titillating stories without making any clear moral decision
whether they are spreading falsehoods or not.
Fake news often makes an impression on people because the brain processes
that implement reality monitoring are imperfect. According to psychologists and
neuroscientists, source monitoring is a difficult process for the brain, which
judges sources by their linkages to other memories.21 Thus, over time, the brain
may forget that it once deemed stories unreliable. Also, adeptness in source
monitoring differs across individuals, and temporal diencephalic and frontal lobe
damage in the brain may contribute to extreme defects in source monitoring.22
As an example, let’s look at fake wrestling matches, where wrestlers appear
to break the rules and almost kill each other. People seem to derive pleasure
from watching a match that others would say is obviously fake and trying to
pretend that it is real. A word for this strange phenomenon, kayfabe, appeared in
print starting in the 1970s.
The fake wrestling match does not proceed as a by-the-rules high school or
college wrestling match would. Instead, it includes a number of outrageous story
elements. One of the combatants may be flamboyantly evil and/or ugly in his
near nakedness, while the other is clean-cut, handsome, and honorable. The bad
guy acts cowardly, hides behind the ropes, and slips in an illegal strike in plain
view of the audience when the referee briefly looks away. He tortures the
opponent when he is down, and he climbs up high on the ropes and pretends to
jump onto his opponent’s abdomen.
The fakery is often so obvious that any observer would see through at least
some of it. Spectators sometimes even shout, “Fake!” during a match when the
acting is not up to their standards. And yet the match is presented and largely
accepted as if it were true. Spectators seem to want it to be possibly true, at least
some of the time, and they may pretend it is true to stimulate their imaginations.
However, as literary theorist Roland Barthes notes, spectators at these matches
rarely bet on the outcome as they do in other sports: “That would make no sense

… wrestling sustains its originality by all the excesses which make it a spectacle
and not a sport.”23 In other words, at some level, many people enjoy believing
the story and do not care about its factuality.
Fake fighting matches have a long history in many countries, indicating an
enduring story. A ProQuest News & Newspapers search for fake wrestling shows
the phrase dating back to 1890, with a reporter noting that “there have been a lot
of fake wrestling matches lately.”24 Even in ancient Rome, in the minutes
preceding the real gladiatorial combats that sometimes resulted in death, there
was fake combat, prolusio, that whetted the audience’s appetite for the real thing
to follow.25 Prolusio probably resembled modern fake wrestling matches, and in
some ways it may even have been more interesting to watch, in that the actors
were experienced and skilled in manipulating audiences, and some were
celebrities.
Much has improved since ancient Romans released lions to maul and kill
criminals, runaway slaves, and Christians in the Colosseum. We have established
news media with reputations for honesty. The twenty-first century has seen the
birth of fact-checking websites, including AP Fact Check, factcheck.org,
politifact. com, snopes. com, USAfacts.org, and wikitribune. com. All of these
sites have built their reputation by debunking fake news rather than by reporting
all sides of a controversy without taking sides, which was once common in the
mainstream news media. Unfortunately, most people do not read these fact-
checking websites. In addition, their credibility has recently been compromised
by fake news designed to harm their reputations, leading some members of the
general public to give up the hope of ever finding the real truth.
What conclusions can we draw? Given its presence over the centuries and
millennia, fake news seems to be part of the normal human condition. Fake
performances, fake stories, and fake heroes are ubiquitous. The fakery is so
creative that we cannot view the performances as caused by fundamental
economic forces. Instead, the opposite is true: the fakery, in the form of fake
narratives, affects economic outcomes.