“Truthiness” was still a punchline when Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year in 2006. Comedian Stephen Colbert had coined the term as an eye-roll at the march of bias and opinion over facts. There’s less to laugh at now: the Oxford word of the year for 2016 was “post-truth.”
At RAND, that slipping grasp on the facts—”Truth Decay”—has become a research priority. A new RAND report—Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life by political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh and RAND’s president and CEO, Michael D. Rich—identifies the social, psychological, and historical foundations of the problem and sets out a research agenda to address it.
Earlier this year, Rich, journalist Soledad O’Brien, and political scientist Francis Fukuyama sat down with RAND Review staff writer Doug Irving to discuss the phenomenon of Truth Decay—and the search for solutions to it. CONT.
RAND