Believing what they are told

It’s been one of the more puzzling, but also sinister, aspects of the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces. When Ukrainians were telling family members in Russia about their lives under bombardment, they were being told that it was just not true, or that the bombardment was probably coming from the Ukrainian side as a “false flag” event, or that the Russians were engaged in a legitimate act of self-defence. How have so many Russians, if we can believe the opinion polling, come to be so brainwashed? The answer is threefold.

First, there is a grand narrative that has long gripped the Russian imagination – reiterated by Putin on Victory Day 2022 – that the country has always been under threat from European expansionism. As there is no natural geographical barrier protecting Russia from the West, over the centuries, the Swedes, the Poles, Napoleon’s army and, most recently, Hitler’s Wehrmacht have swept eastwards. The Nazi invasion in 1940 represented the apotheosis of this fear as the German army raced to occupy much of Ukraine and Western Russia, before finally being repelled by the Red Army – with Russian losses of civilians and military estimated at more than five million.

The grand narrative continues with the assertion that Russia, almost alone, defeated Nazi Germany in “The Great Patriotic War” – and that the threat of invasion from the West, now in the form of Nato, remains, with Ukraine as its cat’s paw. Prior to the collapse of communism, Russia (or the Soviet Union, as it then was) had a buffer of Eastern European states to protect it, but as these states were drawn into Nato, Russia was left feeling isolated and threatened.

Into this toxic mix the Kremlin has added the suggestion that the Nazis were never really defeated and, because of the key role that the ultra-right Azov Brigade has played in Ukrainian politics, that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Hence, all Ukrainians are either actual or potential Nazis. This is one explanation for the barbarities that Russian soldiers have been inflicting on both Ukrainian soldiers and the country’s civilians.

The second explanation for this brainwashing is that this grand narrative has been amplified by the Russian media which, during Putin’s rule, has lost almost all its independence so that now there is no major broadcasting service, or newspaper or news website, that is not reproducing Kremlin propaganda about the “special military operation”.

The last major bastion of independent media was the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, which suspended operations just four days after the invasion began, having received its second warning from the government censor for allegedly breaching the so-called “foreign agent law” – the mechanism used to shut down critical media. The other main sources of independent news – the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy, the TV Rain channel, and Meduza news website – had already been closed. Hence, the main source of news for most Russians during the war has been the state-run TV channels which have done little other than pump out up to 15 hours of propaganda every day.

Nor has social media provided an effective alternative source, with Twitter and Facebook both being blocked and Instagram restricted, although it could still be accessed via virtual private networks (VPNs). Instagram has 64 million regular users in Russia, the third most popular social media outlet. WhatsApp is the most popular, with 81 million users, and the Russian platform Vkontake, at 76 million, is in second place. The extent that WhatsApp could be a source of unofficial news is difficult to ascertain since the network is encrypted, but we do know that Vkontake can be relied on not to carry material that challenges the Kremlin line.

The third explanation is how relatively easy it is to get people to believe fake news and disinformation, and how difficult it is to persuade them that these beliefs are false. President Trump’s success in implanting his fake narrative about the “stolen election” into the American mainstream is a case in point. Despite the lie being so blatant, it is still believed by one in three Americans; and this, despite the fact that the US media do not face any of the sorts of restrictions that have wiped out independent media in Russia.

The fact that people appear to be so ready to believe stories that on any rational basis are clearly false, and to accept the “alternative realities” they thrive on, has been attracting growing interest from academic researchers – experimental psychologists in particular. While there is no one simple explanation, the insights they offer can help better understand this phenomenon.

The social psychologists’ starting point is the notion that we are all “cognitive misers”. In other words, just as humans are programmed to conserve their physical strength – taking the lift instead of the stairs – so too do we seek to conserve our mental strength. Hence, to process the vast amounts of data to which we are daily exposed, we tend to construct mental maps, or frames, which help us understand the world. In the days of the Cold War, for example, there was a very simple map which explained international conflicts in terms of “our side” being right and the “other side” being wrong. With the ending of the Cold War, that global map faded for most people, although there are still some – mostly on the far left – who cannot quite shake off the notion that in all foreign conflicts the Russians (the Soviet Union, as was) are the good guys and the Americans/Nato are the bad.

Information that challenges our mind maps causes cognitive dissonance, which occurs when we try to rewire our brains to accept something that, until that point, we have always believed was untrue; in this example, it would be requiring Russians to see themselves as the aggressor and Ukraine as the victim. So, this information is rejected and other sources are looked for which will confirm what we have always believed – this is the so-called “confirmation bias”.

Keep it short and simple and say it often

But the problem of disinformation doesn’t end there. Researchers have found that even if the Russian public were to get access to reports that challenged the Kremlin narrative, the reports would probably be rejected for, apart from “confirmation bias”, there is “source contamination” as well. This would arise because the Russian reader might well regard the source of the discordant information – be it foreign media, foreign governments, or even dissident individuals – as contaminated. So, because they were unsympathetic to any messages that appeared to challenge their current “mind map”, they would either just not notice the messages or, more likely, not retain any memory of them. Indeed, there is evidence of a so-called “backfire effect”, in which partisan audiences do not just disbelieve rebuttals, but the rebuttal actually increases the intensity of their belief in the original lie.

Another factor involved in the embedding of false information is known as “fluency” – the easier the information is to understand, the more likely it is that people will believe it’s true. In other words, if the information fits your world view – eg. if you believe that Nato is an ongoing threat to Russia – it is easier to accept that Ukraine is simply Nato’s pawn and hence it is legitimate to invade the country as an act of “self-defence”. This is why repetition is so important in the process of constructing an “alternative reality”: the more you hear something, the more likely you are to believe it.

The advertising world knew this long before academia. It coined the phrase “banging on the bruise” – make a strong initial impact, and then every subsequent mention reinforces the message. As long as the original statement is strong and memorable, it will have an impact, particularly among partisans. They will recall that first positive impact every time the lie is repeated, even if it is repeated in the process of rebuttal.

When the history of the Russia/Ukraine war comes to be written, it won’t be just on the battlefield that the victory will be seen to have been won or lost (or at least claimed), but on the home front as well. This is why the Kremlin is so keen to prevent the Russian people from learning about the realities of the war – both its build-up and context.

There is little doubt that Ukrainians are similarly affected by the psychological processes described above, but the big difference between their support for their government and Russians doing likewise is that there are no restrictions on what Ukrainians can see or read from foreign sources, other than that emanating from Moscow, while Russians now have virtually no access to foreign news. And, perhaps most important of all, the Ukrainians’ “grand narrative” is simply that of the pride in being an independent nation for almost the first time in their history, and the very real fear that this is in danger of being snatched away from them by their overbearing neighbour.