It’s received wisdom today that tribalism, confirmation bias and other mentalerrors are deeply embedded in human nature. And once social media began exploiting these forces, truth didn’t stand a chance. Well, not so fast. Today’sguest is David Rand, professor of management and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. To cite a very incomplete list of his accolades, he has been recognized by the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarship; the Poynter Institute, which named him fact-checking researcher of the year,and just this past fall by the Thinkers 50 Radar List. His research bridges cognitive science, behavioral economics and social psychology, and from that vantage, he argues that consumers of media have more free will than you might think and that there are ways out of our information dystopia. Dave and I will cover the role of distraction in the spread of misinformation, how fact-checking might actually scale, and why Americans are actually receptiveto other points of view, if you just give them a chance.