D1: The Incentive Trace

Two reports in one week

Imagine two reports land in your feed in the same week. The first says that a policy you have always opposed is failing. It comes from a research group whose donors share your views, though you don't look that up, because the findings seem obviously right. You share it. The second says that something you distrust, say a new drug, a pesticide, a housing development or a school program, is safe and working. You scroll down, find that it was paid for by a company or campaign that stands to benefit, and stop reading. "Well, they would say that."

You have just made two mistakes, and they are mirror images. With the first report you never asked who profited from your believing it. With the second you asked, and then let the answer stand in for the reading. The Incentive Trace exists to catch both, and most of us only ever catch the second one, in other people.

The move

The Incentive Trace is a tool, which on this site means a mental operation you can run on a claim in real time, before you believe it or pass it on. It belongs to the family the site calls Influence Defense: recognizing the engineering behind persuasion.

The move has two halves, and the tagline holds both. First, ask who gains if you believe the claim: money, votes, attention, a career, an audience, or the comfort of being proved right. Second, use that answer to decide how hard to check the claim, not whether it is true. A self-interested source gets more checking, not an automatic verdict.

Running it takes four steps.

1. Name who is making the claim and who paid for, published or amplified it.
2. Ask what each of them gains if you believe it, and what they would lose if you didn't. Include gains that aren't money, such as status, standing with an audience or loyalty to a side.
3. Adjust your starting confidence. The more a source stands to gain, the less its word alone should move you, and the more you should want independent evidence.
4. Check the claim anyway, on its evidence. Then ask whether you ran steps one to three as hard on the sources you already agreed with.

Without the fourth step, the first three are just a sophisticated way of not listening.

Why it works

The reasoning fits in one sentence: incentives don't determine truth, but they calibrate how much verification a claim deserves.

Both halves of that sentence matter. Incentives are real evidence about a source. Someone who will profit from your belief has a reason to say it whether or not it is true, so their saying it tells you less than the same words from someone with nothing riding on it. That is why the tool asks you to adjust your prior, meaning the confidence you hold before you have looked at the evidence itself.

But incentives are evidence about the source, not about the world. A company with a stake in its product may also be the party that knows the product best. An advocacy group may be right about the problem it was founded to fight. A self-interested claim can be true, and a disinterested one can be false. So the tool lowers the weight you give a source's word without settling the question. The claim still has to be checked.

The trace also works in reverse: when someone says something that costs them, their interest gives you reason to take it more seriously, not less.

Researchers have studied whether the funding of a study is associated with its conclusions, and logicians have long named the error of rejecting a claim because of where it came from.

Source still being found. research, from a work actually read, on whether who funds a study is associated with what it concludes, including how large any such association is and in which fields

Source still being found. a reliable account, from a work actually read, of the logical error of judging a claim by its origin or its speaker's interests (often called the genetic fallacy or the circumstantial ad hominem), and of when a source's interests are legitimately relevant to how much its testimony should count

Using it well

The legitimate use is discounting a self-interested claim's credibility without dismissing it outright.

Suppose a town is deciding whether to allow a large new warehouse. The developer releases a study saying the project will create hundreds of local jobs. A residents' group opposed to the project releases its own study saying traffic will double. Run the tool on both. The developer profits if you believe the jobs figure, so its study gets extra checking: how were the jobs counted, are they permanent or temporary, and has the developer made similar promises elsewhere and kept them? The residents' group also gains if you believe its figure, in the form of the outcome it wants and a stronger hand in the fight, so its study gets the same checking: who did the traffic count, on what assumptions, and compared to what?

Neither study is thrown out; both get read with more care than a neutral report would need, and either, both or neither may hold up. A good use of the Incentive Trace ends with the claim checked, and sometimes with the discovery that the interested party was telling the truth.

Example still being found. a real, quoted, dated public case in which someone noted a source's financial or political interest, discounted it, and then checked the claim on its merits, reaching a conclusion either way; ideally one where the source being checked was on the checker's own side

When it becomes a weapon

The weaponized form is "funded by X, therefore false" as a complete argument, applied only to the other side's funding while your own goes unexamined.

There are two faults in that, and they usually travel together. The first is stopping at the trace: treating the discovery of an interest as the end of the inquiry, so that nobody has to look at the evidence. The second is the asymmetry: tracing the money behind the other side's sources while your own side's think tanks, donors, activists and media outlets pass without a glance. Together they turn a tool for calibrating trust into a way of never having to update.

The weaponized form tempts because "follow the money" sounds hard-headed. The name for the broader move is bulverism, a term from C. S. Lewis for explaining why someone holds a view instead of showing that it is wrong. Tracing an incentive is a way of explaining why someone might say something. It is never, by itself, a way of showing that they are wrong.

A few signs help tell the two forms apart:

• The honest use asks what the incentive means for how much checking the claim needs. The weaponized use treats the incentive as the answer.
• The honest use traces the funding and interests of sources on every side. The weaponized use traces only the opposing side's.
• The honest use can end with "the interested party was right." The weaponized use never does.
• The honest use counts interests that are not money, including the attention, audience and standing that come from telling your own side what it wants to hear.

Example still being found. a real, quoted, dated instance of "funded by X, therefore false" used as a complete argument, with the claim itself left unexamined; find examples from both the political left and the political right, for instance one dismissing research because of industry funding and one dismissing research because of foundation, government or activist funding

Run it on your own side first

Every tool on this site comes with this instruction, and it is the real test of whether the tool has been understood. Try these:

• Think of the source you trust most on an issue you care about. Who funds it, and what would it lose, in money, audience or standing, if it told you something you didn't want to hear? Have you ever looked?
• Think of a source you dismissed recently because of who paid for it. Did you ever find out whether its claim was true?
• What do you gain from believing your side is right on this issue: friendships, a sense of who you are, the satisfaction of having been right all along? Would you notice if that were doing some of your thinking?

If the first question is hard to answer, you have been running the trace in one direction only.

Grammars it works against

A grammar, on this site, is a recurring pattern of argument that turns up across many different subjects. This tool is one of the first to reach for against one of them.

• G8: Status Anxiety Dressed as Principle. In this grammar, a position that would protect someone's social standing is argued as pure principle, with the stake left unmentioned, often even to the person holding it. The Incentive Trace asks what a view protects for the person who holds it, which is the question this grammar hides. But it also guards the grammar's other pole, the motive-hunters who explain away every principle as status-seeking, because the trace only adjusts how hard to check a claim and never settles it. The antidote here is the trace and A4: The Mirror Check, run on yourself first.

Related tools

• A4: The Mirror Check asks whether you scrutinized a claim or just liked its conclusion. It is D1's partner against G8, and it supplies the symmetry the weaponized form lacks.
• B5: The Fallacy-Fallacy Guard reminds you that a badly argued claim can still be true. It does for bad arguments what D1's fourth step does for interested sources.
• C5: The Cynicism Firewall separates grading claims from rejecting everything. An Incentive Trace that finds an interest behind every source and stops there has crossed from skepticism into cynicism.
• F2: The Standing/Soundness Split keeps the question of who is speaking apart from whether the claim is true, the same separation D1 keeps between a source's interests and its accuracy.