On Friday, June 23, NPR’s TED Radio Hour turned its attention to the ever-growing topic, “Truth and Lies.” TED speakers shared insights on “navigating in a world where even the facts are up for debate.”

This is one of the focal points of the newly published book, “Fixing Post-Truth Politics“: charting how our civilized societies have reached this point.

Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt spoke about her experience of being sued for libel in the U.K. by a Holocaust denier.

“He knew the documents and he knew the facts, but he somehow twisted them to get this opinion,” she said. “Here is a man who said, and I quote, ‘I’m going to sink the Battleship Auschwitz.'”

As heard in the above interview, in winning the lawsuit, Lipstadt said, “What we did was follow his footnotes back to his sources. And what did we find, not in most cases or in the preponderance of cases, but in every single instance where he made some reference to the Holocaust, his supposed evidence was distorted, half-truth, date changed, sequence changed. We didn’t prove what happened. We proved that what he said happened — and by extension, all deniers because he either quotes them, or they get their arguments from him, is not true. They don’t have the evidence to prove it.”

How this happens is through the psychological premise of “selective exposure,” according to “Fixing Post-Truth Politics:”

… it’s human nature for people to favor information which reinforces their pre-existing views, while at the same time avoiding contradictory information.

Psychologists call the theory “selective exposure:” Upon exposure to specific aspects of information, people tend to incorporate specific portions into their mindset. These choices are made based on their perspectives, beliefs, attitudes and decisions. People mentally dissect the information to which they are exposed, and tend to select favorable evidence while ignoring the unfavorable.

Cyberspace analyst Laura Galante discussed the reactions and ramifications both here and in Russia to that country’s apparent interference in the 2016 American presidential election.

“The dependence that we have for not just our news, but how we are thinking about our collective experience as people and as a country and as a world is just so intensely derived from the Internet right now. Your smartphone is more your reality than walking down the street,” she said.

“So it’s now time to figure out what seems fake and what seems real, why that’s the case, and you don’t have the same spidey feeling or goosebumps on the back of your neck that you get when you’re walking down the street and there’s a shady character walking down the street, and you know there is something you’re not going to trust something they say or take it at face value. You don’t have that feeling yet on the Internet.”

According to “Fixing Post-Truth Politics:”

It’s more important than ever for news consumers to question every bit of news information, particularly political. Is the reporting organization a legitimate news organization? Is the information attributed to unnamed sources? Does the information make any sense? For example, does it make any sense at all for the Pope to endorse Donald Trump?

For all the reasons outlined heretofore, even the most trusting news consumer now should question the authenticity of any report that has any political element.

The news consumers who don’t want to ponder which report is true and which one is false have instead opted for the selective exposure that is part of their human nature. In effect, if the report agrees with their personal line of thinking, it must be true. And if it doesn’t, it must be false …

… which has helped to lead us to the era of post-truth politics in America.

Click here to hear the entire TED Radio Hour presentation on “Truth and Lies.”