Why Do We Believe Things That Aren't True?
— and Why Does It Keep Getting Worse?
Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of Information | March 21, 2026 | Vol. 4, Issue 17
Artificial Intelligence | Information Styles | Intellectual Freedom | Toolbox | Wellbeing
Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly serial exploring how our love of information and connection can help us thrive, individually and collectively. A living lab, this is also one of the places where adaptive infophilia theory is being developed as public scholarship.
📌Access & Attribution: This serial offers free previews always and occasional open access essays to keep scholarship accessible. Students and those facing financial barriers can request complimentary access. If you find value here, please cite the original work and consider supporting the public scholarship through subscription. Proper attribution sustains this work.
Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2026, March 21). Why do we believe things that aren't true — and why does it keep getting worse? Infophilia, A Positive Psychology of Information, 4(17).
Why do people believe things that aren't true — and why does it keep getting worse? Today’s essay introduces the theoretical stack behind adaptive infophilia: Floridi's infosphere as moral environment, Fogg's behavior model as the mechanism of exploitation, and Bronk's information power as the structural force that aims it. Together they explain the problem, partially. Adaptive infophilia supplies what each only gestures toward: the human information relationship itself, what it looks like when healthy, what degrades it, and how it can be cultivated to resist exploitation at every scale from individual habit to institutional design to global governance. We also suggest movies.
An early version of a submitted paper, Adaptive Infophilia: The Ethics of Information Power, is freely available on SocArXiv: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/kjh6w_v1. It predates the theoretical stack in the feature image (top). Comments and engagement welcome.
Related Infophilia essays — open access or partially open include: Knowledge Resistance · What is Truth in the Infopolis? · Cultivate Civic Infophilia (where ChatIP was introduced) · Surfing the Waves of Change (Chris Bronk’s Information Power discussion)
To see more, follow the topic links at the top: Artificial Intelligence · Information Styles · Intellectual Freedom · Toolbox · Wellbeing.