While plenty of people have lied to get ahead in the past, this problem has gotten particularly bad lately. Recent political events in the United States, United Kingdom, and many other democratic countries have caused Oxford Dictionary to choose post-truth politics, “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” as its 2016 word of the year. Less and less people trust the media, in part due to the rise of alternative media, in part due to the growth of opinion-driven reporting, and in part due to criticism of the media by prominent politicians. The replication crisis in a number of scientific fields is eroding the credibility of scientists. The most popular sport in the world is mired in scandals based on deception. Leaders of organizations are lying more and more frequently, and usually do not get punished. It’s not only a problem with public figures: fake news, more recently termed “viral deception,” is sweeping social media, shared by ordinary citizens.

Sharing such misinformation is not necessarily intended to harm others or even deliberately deceive, as our minds are not intuitively set on seeking the truth. Research suggests our emotions and intuitions instead focus on protecting our worldview and personal identity rather than updating our beliefs based on the most accurate information. We are thus not naturally inclined to live by the maxim of “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Being truthful thus requires the same kind of effort as any other sort of civilized, not-instinctive behavior.

Our society as a whole loses out by these lies, while individual liars often gain by their deception, a situation known as a “tragedy of the commons.” A well-known tragedy of the commons is pollution: we all gain from clean air and water, but some individual polluters gain more, at least in the short term, by polluting the environment, harming all of us. Similarly, we all benefit from a society where we can trust each other to tell the truth, but some individuals gain more, in the short term, by abusing this trust and polluting the truth. Fortunately, the environmental movement of the 1970s has now resulted in a situation where many people started recycling and our society passed environmental legislation. In the same way, we can change individual behavior and public policy alike to be more oriented toward the truth through the Pro-Truth Movement, and the PTP is one aspect of this movement to help fight deception.

How does the pledge solve these problems?

Behavioral science research suggests that an important key to addressing such tragedies of the commons involve a combination of strategies. One is changing incentives, namely increasing rewards for behavior that is cooperative and helps society – in this case, telling the truth, and also increasing punishments for behavior that defects from the common good and harms society – lying. Another strategy involves reputation management, clearly showing who is being cooperative, and who is defecting. A third strategy centers around managing the choices available to participants, what is known as nudging. The PTP takes advantage of a fourth behavioral science strategy of precommitment – if you publicly commit to a certain course, you will be much more likely to follow it.

The PTP, created by a group of behavioral scientists, combines all of these strategies. By doing so, it provides a tool that motivates all who take it to share accurate information and avoid sharing misinformation.

Besides providing the motivation, the PTP spells out what it means to orient toward the truth. After all, it is very easy to say you share the truth, regardless of whether you do so. It is even easy to say you “verified” a source before sharing the information. However, if you verified it through checking a source known to be systematically unreliable, whether Occupy Democrats for liberals or Breitbart for conservatives, you have violated the standard of avoiding unreliable websites, and thus violated the pledge. As you will see below, if you retract your statement, you will not suffer any penalties from PTP advocates. The clear standard about truth-oriented behavior not only offers guidance to those who take the pledge, but also a basis for evaluating whether pledge-takers abide by their commitment. For more information, watch this Q&A video about the Pro-Truth Pledge.

Misinformation is anything that goes against the truth of reality. It can mean directly lying about the situation at hand, for instance when an athlete denies taking steroids that she was actually taking. It can mean lying by omission, as when a scholar publishes a study with a successful experiment, while hiding that he conducted 50 of the same experiments that failed, until by random chance one finally worked, a phenomenon known as publication bias.In some cases, misinformation is obvious, so that anyone can see it. In other cases, it is less so. For those cases, the PTP calls on pledge signers to rely on credible fact-checking websites and/or on the scientific consensus.

Rather than going through the process of vetting fact-checking websites, we have decided to outsource that work to Facebook, which is partnering with websites it has vetted and evaluated as credible. As of the initial unveiling, the websites include Snopes, Politifact, ABC News, and FactCheck.org, and more will be added over time. All these are members of a common coalition, the Poynter International Fact Checking Network, and have committed to a common set of principles. Any other websites that Facebook uses will be considered credible for PTP purposes. Someone who takes the pledge will be considered in violation of the pledge if they make a claim that is similar to those rated as “mostly false” or “completely false” by one of these websites (they use different language, but you get the idea). In a case where credible websites disagree, for instance one calls a claim “mostly false” and another calls it “mostly true,” we will not consider the claim a violation of the PTP.

In some cases, fact-checking websites have not evaluated certain claims, but the claim will be opposed by scientific research. Since science is the best of all methods we as human beings have found to determine the reality about the world and predict the outcomes of our actions, someone will be evaluated as in violation of the pledge if they make a claim that goes against the scientific consensus. We are comfortable with the Wikipedia definition of scientific consensus as “the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity. Consensus is normally achieved through communication at conferences, the publication process, replication (reproducible results by others), and peer review. These lead to a situation in which those within the discipline can often recognize such a consensus where it exists, but communicating to outsiders that consensus has been reached can be difficult, because the ‘normal’ debates through which science progresses may seem to outsiders as contestation. On occasion, scientific institutes issue position statements intended to communicate a summary of the science from the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’ of the scientific community.” Thus, we can recognize scientific consensus by position statements by prestigious scientific organizations, such as this statement from 18 associations on climate change, or the result of meta-analysis studies (evaluations of a series of other prominent studies) that come to a clear determination, such as this study on the relationship of vaccines and autism. Since science gets ahead in part through individual scientists with expertise in a certain domain challenging the scientific consensus in that domain, those who are scientists do not have to abide by the scientific consensus in areas where they have expertise.

The pledge is violated when you share misinformation. Violating the pledge does not mean you are going to be immediately punished for doing so, since the PTP is not intended to be primarily punitive. In putting facts first, we are not trying to play “gotcha” when someone makes an innocent mistake that causes a violation the pledge. After all, we aim to push ourselves and others who signed the pledge to be better than our natural inclinations – just like it is against the natural inclination of many of us to avoid a second piece of chocolate cake. Yet taking the second piece and thus violating our aspirations to eat well doesn’t mean we drop our goal of having healthy eating habits, but simply try to figure out what went wrong and aim to do better in the future.

Similarly, each of us may well eventually fail to be oriented toward the truth, and make a statement that goes against a fact-checking website or the scientific consensus or the clearly visible truth of reality. We rely on a community of truth-oriented individuals to support each other and provide compassionate correction when we fail, helping advance open-minded thinking among all of us and thus improving our society, as research shows. A key piece of the pledge is that all pledge-takers will hold all others who took the pledge accountable for upholding the truth. If someone is unwilling to correct themselves when provided clear information about their mistake, it is the responsibility of each of us who took the pledge to hold that person accountable by publicizing that person’s actions in appropriate channels, to penalize that person through harming that person’s reputation. This applies especially to holding public figures who took the pledge accountable, as they have a bigger impact on public opinion and the common good of trust and truth in our society.

How does this accountability work in practice? While a public figure sharing misinformation by mistake suffers no penalty, one deliberately violating the pledge – as shown by a refusal to retract misinformation one shared – suffers substantial negative consequences. All of those who take the pledge have the opportunity to sign up for action alerts, and can also sign up to be a Pro-Truth advocate. Pro-Truth advocates can focus on a number of activities, including monitoring others who have taken the pledge, particularly public figures. If a Pro-Truth advocate finds that someone has violated the pledge, especially a public figure, the advocate would contact the person privately. As part of this process, the advocate would adopt “charity mode,” meaning being more charitable toward the alleged violator than is one’s intuition, and assuming an “innocent until reasonably shown guilty” perspective – perhaps the person misspoke, or you misheard something. Use curiosity and questioning to determine whether there is clear evidence that the pledge has been violated. If there is clear evidence, provide this to the alleged violator, and if the person retracts her/his words, the matter is resolved.

If the alleged violator does not retract her/his statement, the advocate may publicize the matter via the advocate’s own channels, social media and otherwise. In doing so, the advocate must provide both: 1) Clear evidence of the violation, and 2) Clear evidence of a good-faith, reasonable effort to get the alleged violator of the pledge to address the violation. The advocate may also spread word to other PTP advocates with whom the advocate has contacts for them to publicize the information, as well as others whom the advocate considers salient to the deception at hand. If the individual is a private citizen, the matter ends there, as this sort of reputational blow provides a significant enough disincentive to cause the large majority private citizens who take the pledge to avoid lying.

If the alleged violator is a public figure, the advocate would escalate the matter to a PTP local, regional, or national mediating committee, depending on the status of the public figure. This committee includes a group of vetted volunteers who would evaluate the evidence provided by the advocate, contact the public figure for a chance for the person to offer an explanation, and make a ruling – either determining that there is a violation, that there is no violation, or that the evidence is insufficient to make a judgment. If there is a ruling of a violation, then this ruling is evaluated by a member of the PTP Central Coordinating Committee, to ensure fairness and accuracy, and provide an external perspective. In the case that the PTP Central Coordinating Committee member also determines that a violation has occurred, the committee then contacts the alleged violator, offering the person another chance to retract her/his words. By this time, the public figure had a number of opportunities to clarify the situation and correct it if a mistake has been made, rather than if the public figure aimed to make a deliberate deception to pollute the truth and hurt all of us. This process might sound a little convoluted, but it minimizes the possibility of the PTP being politicized or corrupted at a local level.

If the public figure still refuses to take her/his words back, the PTP mediating committee would issue a press advisory that the public figure is in contempt of the pledge to put reputational pressure on the thought leader, with clear evidence of the violation as well as the efforts it made to get the public figure to revise the violation. The PTP mediating committee would also contact relevant organizations with which the person who violated the pledge is affiliated, such as the radio station if it is a radio show host, or a university if it is a scientist. It would also issue a PTP Action Alert to those who indicated they want to receive such alerts – either at the local, regional, or national level, depending on the stature of the public figure – for them to email/Tweet and otherwise message the public figure encouraging her/him to revise the relevant statements, and writing letters-to-the-editor about the situation. Finally, the public figure will be listed on the PTP website as in contempt of the pledge. This provides considerable reputation pressure for a public figure to avoid being in contempt of the pledge – if the public figure envisions violating the pledge deliberately, s/he would be better off not signing it at all. To summarize, innocent violations of the pledge will not be penalized, only deliberate attempts to misrepresent the truth and thus undermine the public good of truth and trust.

Who will monitor the PTP mediating committees? Other pledge-takers, of course. The PTP mediating committees have strong incentives to ensure that their rulings are as fair and objective as is possible, because their whole reputation rests on such objectivity. The outcomes of their proceedings – if there is a ruling of a violation – will be provided as evidence for scrutiny by other pledge-takers, and the public at large. These outcomes will not be provided if the public figure retracts her/his words at any stage, to prevent reputation damage for the public figure, since the PTP is not meant to be punitive but corrective.

Violations of the pledge only apply to statements made in and about the public sphere. In other words, it does not apply to private interactions, such as when a wife tells her husband his new shirt makes him look really muscular, regardless of what she really thinks. It does not apply to semi-private contexts, such as when a fisherman tells tall tales about the size of the fish he caught. It also does not apply to religious or other values-based contexts, except in cases where the statement is a clear piece of misinformation about public policy. It also does not apply to cases that cannot be reasonably verified and/or have to do with personal beliefs and spiritual experiences, such as when a politician or a pastor says “I support this policy because of God’s personal revelations to me,” or an environmentalist says “I support protecting the environment because otherwise the spirit of Mother Earth would suffer” – it is not possible to verify whether God exists or made revelations to someone or whether the spirit of Mother Earth exists and experiences suffering if the environment is not protected. The pledge matters only in verifiable statements in the public sphere, such as when a private citizen shares a piece of viral deception online, or a journalist misquotes a source, or a pastor makes false claims about miracle healing and thus encourages parishioners to avoid going to doctors, or a scientist hides unfavorable experimental results relevant to public policy,  or a politician spreads lies about her opponent.

While the pledge is only violated when you share misinformation, pledge-takers can choose to stick by the word of the pledge but go against its spirit through misleading if not explicitly false statements – what is known as “spin.” In these cases, we encourage other pledge-takers to call out fellow pledge-takers who fail to live by the spirit of the pledge. In almost all cases, spinning the information will go against one of the truth-oriented behaviors outlined in the pledge. Bring this to the attention of the pledge-taker who fails to engage in this behavior, and encourage that pledge-taker to model the values of the pledge.

First, let us consider the individual rewards for different groups of pledge-takers:

Finally, there are a number of benefits that accrue to all who take the pledge. All pledge-takers gain the benefits of cultivating socially beneficial – what many would call more moral and ethical – habits of mind, word, and deed. All gain the pride and self-satisfaction of standing up for your ethical and moral convictions. All gain the benefits in building a more truth-driven public culture, and fighting the pollution of truth in politics. All gain the benefit of being role models for others, whether ordinary citizens or public figures. All gain the benefit of joining a network of and collaborating with other truth-oriented people.

A candidate for Congress took the Pro-Truth Pledge. He later posted on his Facebook wall a screenshot of a tweet by Donald Trump criticizing minority and disabled children. After being called out on it, he went and searched Trump’s feed. He could not find the original tweet, and while Trump may have deleted that tweet, the candidate edited his own Facebook post to say that “Due to a Truth Pledge I have taken I have to say I have not been able to verify this post.” He indicated that he would be more careful with future postings.

A US Army veteran and member Special Operations community took the pledge. He then wrote a blog post about how it impacted him. He notes that “I’ve verbally or digitally passed on bad information numerous times, I am fairly sure, as a result of honest mistakes or lack of vigorous fact checking.” He describes how after taking the pledge, he felt “an open commitment to a certain attitude” to “think hard when I want to play an article or statistic which I’m not completely sold on.” Having taken the Pro-Truth Pledge, he found it “really does seem to change one’s habits,” helping push him both to correct his own mistakes with an “attitude of humility and skepticism, and of honesty and moral sincerity,” and also to encourage “friends and peers to do so as well.”

A Christian pastor and community leader took the Pro-Truth Pledge. He related how he “took the Pro-Truth Pledge because I expect our political leaders at every level of government to speak truth and not deliberately spread misinformation to the people they have been elected to serve. Having taken the pledge myself, I put forth the effort to continually gather information validating stories and headlines before sharing them on my social media outlets.”

A former US intelligence officer, who retired from service after 4 decades, took the Pro-Truth Pledge. He later described how soon after taking the pledge, a piece of news “that played right to my particular political biases hit cable TV and then the Internet and of course my first inclination was to share it as quickly and widely as possible. But then I remembered the pledge I’d signed and put the brakes on. I decided to wait a bit to see how it played out (and boy-howdy am I glad I did.)… As it turned out the story was a complete dud, ‘fake news’ as they say. That experience has led me to be much more vigilant in assessing, and sharing, stories that appeal to my political sensibilities. I now make a much bigger effort to fact-check before I post or share.”

Bill Cunnigham is a prominent conservative talk show host who had Trump on his show, and is ranked 27 among “Most Important Radio Show Talk Hosts” in America by Talkers Magazine. We were invited to talk with Cunningham about Trump’s allegations that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower in the 2016 presidential election. Using strategies informed by the Pro-Truth Pledge, we had a civil conversation and this strong supporter of Trump acknowledged that Trump behaved inappropriately in tweeting his allegations without providing any evidence.

We did an interview in October 2016 with the well-known Christian conservative radio show host Scott Sloan, who had previously had a friendly conversation with Trump during the election campaign. Using the tenets of the Pro-Truth Pledge, we discussed whether Trump or Clinton would make the US more secure. While others experienced great difficulties convincing Sloan to acknowledge facts, we provided evidence specifically targeted to prove convincing to Republicans. Namely, we showed that prominent Republicans who served in the national security apparatus thought Trump would make us less safe than Clinton. As part of doing so, we showed that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric is not contributing to our security, due to the infinitesimally small chance of any given Muslim committing a terrorist attack. As a result, Sloan updated his beliefs and confirmed that from the perspective of safety, Trump is a worse choice than he previously thought.

The tenets of the Pro-Truth Pledge are sticky: people tend to remember them over time. For instance, after we did an interview in October 2016 on the radio show of the well-known Christian conservative radio show host Scott Sloan, we did another interview with him about a month afterward in November 2016. Sloan specifically recollected the October 2016 conversation where we talked about the low likelihood of any Muslim being a terrorist. He spontaneously stated that he remembered and re-affirmed that any individual Muslim is very, very unlikely to be a terrorist.

In January 2017, we had a radio interview with the well-known Christian conservative radio show host Scott Sloan, who had a friendly conversation with Trump during the election campaign. We talked with Sloan on why Republicans like himself should care about post-truth politics. After all, Trump won the presidency in part by using post-truth tactics, making it politically advantageous for Republicans to avoid calling out post-truth political engagement. We focused our conversation on key tenets from the Pro-Truth Pledge, and highlighted how post-truth politics would highly likely lead to corruption and authoritarianism. Since these issues are of major concern to Republicans as well as Democrats, Sloan agreed that Republicans should be concerned about post-truth politics and criticize lies, even by their own side. He subsequently showed greater willingness to acknowledge lies by Republicans, for instance on February 15, 2017 airing a segment about a Republican judge suggesting Trump should be impeached.

The 13 behaviors of the Pro-Truth Pledge can prevail even over very politically charged topics. The well-known Christian conservative radio show host Scott Sloan had a friendly conversation with Trump during the election campaign. We had a radio interview with Sloan two days after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, where we compared the evidence supporting Trump’s explanation for the firing and the explanation of leading Democrats. We talked with Sloan about how behavioral science findings result in those with certain partisan beliefs to prefer the explanations offered by those who share their perspective. However, we then discussed with Sloan how many mainstream Republican leaders expressed concerns over Trump firing Comey and aligned more with the Democratic explanation. Thus, we encouraged Sloan to update toward that explanation. At the end of the conversation, Sloan did indeed change his mind more to perceive the Democratic narrative as more closely aligned with reality, and affirmed his previous commitment to acknowledging and criticizing lies from Republicans.

Public figures want to know that they will get recognition and positive reputation if they sign the PTP. The PTP Updates provide them with that benefit. We plan to send one every couple of weeks, with new public figures who signed the pledge, and also ones who signed it earlier to share about how they behaved differently due to having signed the PTP. The PTP would have a significantly bigger positive impact if the public figures knew that many people were signed up to the these updates. It would be especially impactful if you read through the updates and then Tweeted/emailed and otherwise messages public figures whose messages you appreciated in the PTP Update, especially ones in your locale. Still, despite this benefit, we decided not to make PTP Updates obligatory, to enable people who have a strong distaste for additional emails to participate in the PTP.

We need to put pressure on public figures who are in contempt of the pledge, and PTP Action Alerts are a vital way of doing so. Once a PTP mediating committee makes a determination that a public figure not simply made an innocent violation of the pledge, but engaged in an intentional deception and is unwilling to back away, it would issue an Action Alert to those who indicated they want to receive such alerts – either at the local, regional, or national level, depending on the stature of the public figure – for them to email/Tweet and otherwise message the public figure encouraging her/him to revise the relevant statements, and writing letters-to-the-editor about the situation. To have meaningful reputational pressure, we need as many people signed up to receive PTP Action Alerts, and to take the steps necessary to mount this pressure. Still, despite this benefit, we decided not to make PTP Action Alerts obligatory, to enable people who have a strong distaste for additional emails to participate in the PTP.

Having your address enables PTP advocates to know how many in their locale signed up to the PTP, and use this as a data point to advocate for public figures to sign the PTP. This is especially salient for local and regional elected officials, who always want to see the specific addresses of constituents to know who in their district signed the PTP. Another benefit of giving the address is that it enables PTP advocates who have the function of local organizers to reach out to you and help you participate in various PTP-oriented activities, getting you plugged into both Pro-Truth activism and Pro-Truth community activities. Finally, it enables us to send you PTP-related marketing materials that you can use to promote the pledge. Again, this is not obligatory but highly beneficial.

Sharing that you took the pledge via your media channels enables others to have a greater confidence that they can trust you more and rely on you to keep your word. Moreover, it enables others who took the PTP help you abide by the pledge, and offer guidance and support when you might mistakenly go against the tenets of the pledge. Additionally, it can help motivate other people to take the pledge if they know that you took it.

Pro-Truth advocates are people who want to contribute their time to advance the PTP and other truth-oriented activities. Regarding the PTP in particular, being a Pro-Truth advocate involves any combination of the following four activities: organizing, public promotion, lobbying, and monitoring/evaluating. In all cases, Pro-Truth advocates get various support and training from the PTP core organizers in their efforts.

• If you do organizing, you would help recruit and coordinate other people in engaging in PTP-oriented activities. Being an organizer for the Pro-Truth Pledge involves organizing other people to ensure that the outcomes of the Pro-Truth Pledge are met, namely that: 1) The PTP is promoted to the public, getting more and more people to sign it; 2) There is effective lobbying of public figures, especially politicians, to get them to sign it; 3) There is effective monitoring of public figures who signed the pledge, evaluation of any potential pledge violations, behind-the-scenes efforts to get public figures to revise problematic statements, and if not, then public pressure on them to revise problematic statements. See the three sections below on the specific steps you would be recruiting people to do, and especially the first step on public promotion on how to help yourself recruit other advocates who you would then organize. You should also be able to jump in and do any of the three activities described below, so that you know how they are done and can step in if a volunteer needs a brief break, as well as have the familiarity with the tasks necessary to be able to manage volunteers doing any of the three. You need to find other organizers to help you have life balance and be able to step away for brief periods as life stuff comes up. Finally, you need to be able to form a virtual or in-person community for volunteers to help them feel motivated and engaged and invested in the project. If you have leadership, follow-through, and planning skills, you may well make a good organizer.
• If you do public promotion, you engage in finding venues to tell private citizens about the PTP and encourage them to take it. This may involve solely focusing on people in your locale, for instance finding opportunities to speak about it at rallies, service clubs, churches and secular groups, schools and universities, and any other venues. A super-easy way to promote the pledge is to purchase and wear PTP-themed merchandise, especially when you do PTP-themed activities, but also just out and about – it’s a great conversation starter. Alternatively, you can focus on social media, and go to various Facebook groups or Reddit subreddits to promote the PTP there. You can write blogs or letters-to-the-editor about the pledge. You can do a combination of all of the above, and any other things involved in getting the PTP out there. Then, as people get involved, you can either help organize them to promote the pledge, or connect them to another PTP advocate who does organizing. Here is a link to a documents folder that you can use with fliers, a sign-up form, and the option to make a binder for people to sign the PTP. Use these instructions and the materials in the folder linked above to create a PTP sign-up binder, which is very convenient to use when gathering signatures for the PTP in-person, and here is a link to a video with PTP-specific training on doing in-person signature gathering. If you have good communication skills, you would likely make a good promoter.
• If you do lobbying, you would work to get various public figures to sign the pledge. This may involve approaching the minister of your church or secular group leader, or local journalists and academics, or your boss in the company where you work, and convincing them to sign the pledge. This may involve traditional lobbying, such as going to the office of a politician to get her/him to sign the pledge. You can also get private citizens to sign the pledge and sign a separate statement calling for their local representatives to sign the pledge, putting pressure on the politicians. After you go to meet with a politician several times and the politician still refuses to sign the pledge, you can go to friendly media contacts – ideally ones you got to sign the pledge earlier – and tell the contact about the situation, as well as show them the signatures of ordinary citizens asking the politician to sign the pledge. This may result in a news story that would both spread word about the pledge and put some pressure on the politician to sign it, or be perceived as having something to hide. The benefits section of the PTP FAQ should serve you well in advocating for such public figures to sign the pledge. If you have good networking and advocacy skills, you probably would be a good lobbyist.
• If you do monitoring and evaluating, you would keep track of public figures, and to a lesser extent private citizens, who took the pledge, and make sure they abide by it. You would read through their social media feeds and speeches, observe their actions, and browse their press releases. If you find something that smells fishy to you, you would investigate whether it violates the PTP. If you think it does, you would follow the process outlined above on punishments for violating the pledge. Those who have served for a while and successfully in monitoring may apply to be evaluators, sitting on the committee of vetted volunteers who evaluates compliance with the PTP and makes rulings about whether someone is in contempt.

If you are a private citizen, just email us and we will list you as having taken the pledge and later renouncing it. If you are a public figure, do the same, but keep in mind that any investigations will keep going. If we find a violation of the pledge, and you refuse to retract your statements, you will be listed as both in contempt of the pledge and also as having renounced it. This last clause is intended to make sure that public figures do not simply renounce the pledge when they have deliberately lied and want to renounce their taking of the pledge to avoid the negative reputation consequences of a ruling against them.

The PTP was written by a group heavy on social scientists and its implementation is organized by a non-partisan group of volunteers. It is part of a broader Rational Politics (RAP) project, which gathers thoughtful citizens of all political stripes devoted to fighting post-truth politics, meaning politics focused on emotions and personal beliefs and rejecting objective facts. We see these political methods as one of the worst problems for our global society in terms of how important, neglected, and solvable it is. In addressing this issue, we aim to use best practices in communicating and marketing both to get people to care about truth in politics and to provide them with the tools and resources to use evidence and reason in making wise political decisions that will benefit our society as a whole. To do so, we are launching the Pro-Truth Movement to bring us from our post-truth present into a post-lies future. RAP is a subproject of Intentional Insights (InIn), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting rational thinking and wise decision-making in politics and other areas of life to bring about an altruistic and flourishing world. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, InIn does not engage in types of partisan political activity prohibited by the IRS, and the PTP is a form citizen advocacy for the non-partisan value of truth in politics and other areas relevant to our public sphere.