The information fallacy consists of believing that, if we provide people with truthful, objective and undistorted information, they will be able to digest and act rationally with respect to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fallacy of information brought into everyday life tells us that, if we report the effects of alcohol, drugs, sugar, tobacco or salt, people will stop consuming them to protect their own health.
I studied engineering at a time when computers were processing large amounts of data and delivering information. We were proud of this technological breakthrough, but I soon realised that such information was not enough to explain the outcomes of people’s decision-making processes and behaviours. Unbeknownst to me, I was faced with the information fallacy.
Under this erroneous conception of human behaviour, both the public and private sectors have wasted billions of pesos in dissemination or advertising campaigns delivering information with the aim of changing or guiding people’s behaviour.
It has been years of learning and the first to come close to understanding how to overcome the information fallacy were the cosmetic companies, hand in hand with advertising agencies. Revlon has worked since its beginnings under the premise that: “in the factory we make cosmetics, in the shop we sell hope”. In this, as in many cases, product information loses relevance to the promise of brands that empathise with the consumer’s desires.
The great revolution that definitively defeated the information fallacy gave birth to social networks. Facebook has almost reached three billion users, YouTube is at two and a half billion, Instagram at one and a half billion and TikTok at one billion. The latter is the favourite of young people between thirteen and seventeen years old, capturing the imagination of that generation, providing very little information and sharing many experiences.
With this background, one might ask: Is it not time to take a different look at education? All the information is on Google. Google knows more than me and whoever is reading this column; more than any teacher, scientist, worker or businessman and, of course, more than any politician.
Education must make a structural change. The philosopher Daniel Innerarity, who is currently in Chile to take part in Puerto de Ideas in Antofagasta, argues that teaching should move away from the role of providing information and try to confer a capacity for discernment, orientation, criteria and interpretation of the world in which we live. “What teachers do not have to do is compete with Google”.
Innerarity’s assertion is very strong in all subjects taught in education systems and is even more relevant in socio-emotional education. The latter is not susceptible to being “taught” under the classical standards of pedagogy. In order to acquire and develop habits of coexistence, it is necessary to become aware of what the fallacy of information means.
