July 12, 2018 • 47 mins
If a lie is repeated often enough, are we more likely to believe it? Sadly, the answer is yes. Psychologists call it the illusory truth effect and it influences both our daily lives and the larger movements of politics and culture. Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick for a two-part discussion of untruths, the human mind and just what you can do to fight the big lies at work in your world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back part two of our exploration of the
illusory truth effect, probably the liar's best trick. If you
(00:25):
haven't heard our last episodes, you'd probably go back listen
to that first. But if you haven't, or if you have,
let's just do a quick recap of what we talked
about last time. We discussed all of the research on
this thing that's sort of been part of folk wisdom
that if you say something and if you repeat it
and repeat it and repeat it, people become over time
more likely to believe that thing. And that is thoroughly
(00:48):
validated by experimental research, right. And we also talked a
little bit about why does it even make sense that
we would come to believe things that were not true
about the world that we live in just because they
were repeated. Yeah, And so the basis that we ultimately
ended up on last time that seems to be favored
by most of the psychologists to study this is based
in the idea of processing fluency that for whatever reason,
(01:12):
one researcher we talked about last time came to believe
that it was because of conditioning based on real world effects.
But for whatever reason, we tend to associate things that
are easy to process, things with high processing fluency with truth.
So something's easy to read, we think it's more true.
Or if something is an idea we've seen or heard
(01:33):
or encountered before, because that's easier to process. Because of familiarity,
we believe that it is more likely to be true
than if we're encountering it for the first time. But
of course in all of this extreme implausibility is going
to be a boundary condition that's going to kick in.
So this is like the Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer?
Uh level of of of implausibility? What just because the
(01:55):
ages don't match up right well, just and it's just
kind of like, all right, I'm not blieeding that that's
it's ridiculous, but some people do believe that. So your
boundary condition may not be where somebodynoundary condition is that
the boundary conditions will vary from individual to individual. Um.
So yeah, So the question that we should address to
start off in this one is in the last episode,
(02:16):
we discussed how this effect has been thoroughly validated in
the lab. But here's a question does it work in
the real world and is it really all that powerful?
Like a lot of researchers seem to assume that, surely,
if you already know something about a subject, repetition of
a contradictory false statement wouldn't actually undermine your real knowledge,
(02:38):
would it. Surely they would tend to assume that this
slusory truth effect only works for state statements that were
uncertain about to begin with, and statements that seem highly plausible,
like if you didn't know anything about either Ted Cruz
or the Zodiac Killer really and then you would just
sort of say, all right, maybe that's possible, whereas an
individual who has read multiple books on the Zodiac Killer
(03:01):
would say, no, that doesn't that doesn't match up. That
is just ridiculous. Yeah, So that that's the assumption. But unfortunately,
some more recent research has really turned that assumption on
its head. So I want to talk about an important
recent study in the illusory truth effect that brings it's
a bearer of bad news. The study is from the
(03:22):
Journal of Experimental Psychology General in by Fasio Brashier, Pain
and marsh and it's called knowledge does not protect against
illusory truth. So they pointed out that the illusory truth
effect that we talked about last time, based on processing fluency,
is widely accepted, well established, but it had been previously
(03:42):
thought that this effect was constrained by a few things. Now,
one constraint shown to actually exist in the literature is
recollection of the quality of the source of the information.
So previous studies have shown that if you specifically remember
where a statement came from, and you consider the source
of the statement a dishonest or untrustworthy source, that can
(04:06):
produce kind of a reverse truth effect, where repetition of
a statement known to come from a liar or an
untrustworthy source causes us to disbelieve it. So this sounds
like this should be good news, right right? Yeah? Did
I ultimately the question did I hear that on the radio? Did?
Or did I see it on a T shirt? Yeah?
Or was this on the cover of the National Enquirer?
(04:27):
Like you remember that's where it came from, and you're
you know, that's an untrustworthy source. So it actually has
the reverse effect. You hear that repeated and it makes
you go, no, no, no, that's not true at all.
But this isn't as much of a protection as we think,
because honestly, how well do you remember the exact source
of every bit of semantic knowledge in your head? Why no,
(04:50):
bat Boy did not come from the New York Times,
But there are lots of other things that are in
your head that did come from the cover of the
National Enquirer, and you don't remember that that's where it
aim from. I guarantee it you've stood in line at
the grocery store. Well, if it's a story about any
particular aged celebrities, brave last days or sad last days,
(05:13):
they probably came from inquired But yes, there there, there's
probably there are probably some stories in there that I
would not definitely be able to pin down to inquire
versus other sources, Robert, I see right through your bravado.
Some Inquirer stories have gotten through to you. Uh yeah.
Other studies have backed this up. After just a period
of a few weeks, what may have once been stored
in the brain as false claim by an untrustworthy source
(05:36):
could potentially, over time become just a familiar statement I remember, which,
of course, once it's familiar translates it into more likely
to be a true fact. There was at least one
study that looked into this by beg Annas and far
Nacci in nineteen two called Dissociation of Processes and belief,
source recollections, statement, familiarity, and the Illusion of truth, And
(06:00):
basically they found that when the source of a claim
is not super memorable as unreliable, familiarity can be more
important than truth or reliability. Okay, so it's not necessarily
a like a magazine that that has a negative reputation
in your mind, but it's not something that's completely reputable either.
It just kind of follows in between. Or even if
(06:21):
it has a negative reputation and it's just not all
that memorable, you can lose track of where it came
from and it will suffer from the illusory truth effect.
This can happen even when you should have remembered that
it came from an untrustworthy source. There are exceptions when
the source is really memorable, but a lot of times
it doesn't protect you. Now, the second assumption about constraints
(06:45):
on the illusory truth effect is about knowledge. Right, We've
all got knowledge already in our heads, and the idea
is that pre existing knowledge will protect against the effect,
and this is what came under scrutiny in this particular
study by Fasio and our co co authors. In so,
despite being an assumption repeated again and again in the
(07:05):
illusory truth literature, very few of the studies actually bothered
to test whether knowledge protects people. I was just sort
of asserted to be true as if it were obvious,
and the few that did bother to test it in
any way generally did so by testing how the effect
presented in people who claimed subject area expertise. So uh,
(07:26):
these studies yielded contradictory results. But here's a couple of examples.
Scroll in nineteen eight three found that if you rate
yourself as an expert on cars, Robert, would you rate
yourself as an expert on cars? But some people would win.
Some people around the office. Yeah, car experts, well found
suffered smaller illusory truth effects uh than non experts on
(07:47):
car trivia. So that would suggest, okay, knowledge gives you
a little bit of an edge. You're not You're not
as susceptible as amateurs. And then Parks and Tough in
two thousand and six had people rate claims about known
versus unknown consumer brands, and the illusory truth effect was
bigger for statements about brands that people were unfamiliar with.
(08:08):
That makes sense. So like, if you didn't already know
anything about this brand, you were more susceptible to illusory
truth effect on statements about the brand. Yeah, that makes
perfect sense. On the other hand, Archy's Hackett and boem
in nine nine found the opposite, that the higher a
person rated their expertise in a subject, the more susceptible
they were to the illusory truth effect in that subject area.
(08:32):
Makes you wonder if there's like some kind of insecurity
or like identity protective thing going on that. Yeah, like
I don't want I don't I don't want to be wrong,
So I'm just gonna nod my head on that. I
don't want to look bad. I've already staked my reputation
on being a car expert. Also, boem in nineteen found
that psychology majors showed a larger illusory truth effect on
(08:54):
psychology than non majors. But there's some issues with these studies,
so Assio and her co authors point out that these
types of tests don't actually manipulate direct knowledge of whether
the statements are true or false, just sort of the
perception of related knowledge. So they wanted to test this directly.
They created a big list of statements like we've seen
(09:15):
in these other tests, where you'll have true statements and
false statements, and they base this off existing lists of
facts that have been shown in previous studies to be
either generally known or generally unknown. And this created four
categories of statements. You've got known truths, unknown truths, known falsehoods,
and unknown falsehoods. Here's some examples. You've got a known
(09:37):
truth quote, the cyclops is a legendary one eyed giant
of Greek mythology. Robert checks out. Checks out. Okay, how
about the Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean in the world.
Checks out. Then you go into known falsehoods. The minotaur
is the legendary one eyed giant of Greek mythology. Absolutely not.
The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean in the world,
(09:58):
and most people are expected to know that these are
not true statements. Then you've got unknown stuff. Here's an example.
Unknown truth Billy the kid's real last name? What was it?
It's Bonnie. Unknown falsehood Billy the kid's real last name
is Garrett. Yeah, I would have It would have been
a toss up for me because I did not know
(10:18):
Billy the kid's last name. I thought maybe it was
a kid, you know, as in kid Rock as Kid
Rocks first name is Billy kids last name and his
middle name is there. There you go. So experiment one
using this set of statements, forty students in the first phase.
Subjects were shown a subset of statements from the list
of all four types, and they were just asked to
(10:39):
judge how interesting the statements were. You know, that sounds
like a really fun task, right, Billy the kid's last
name is Bonnie? How interesting was that? I get? More
interesting than some names? Yeah? Maybe, I guess. I don't know.
I didn't find that one that interesting. Yeah, I don't know.
I guess it sounds like Bonnie as in like pretty
it sounds. It sounds maybe a little odd for what,
(11:01):
based on the photos, need to be kind of like
an ugly looking, you know, Western outlaw. It makes me
think like a Robert Burns kind of poem thing. And
Bonnie Glenn or whereas Garrett sound, you know, it has
kind of a guttural sound to it. Ye, got right, okay,
So then they got the second phase. This happened immediately
after the first phase. Students were given another subset of
statements from the list, again all four types of statements,
(11:22):
and they were warned that some statements were true and
some were false, And they were also warned that they
would see some repeats from the list that they had
just reviewed for how interesting they were. And then they
rated the claims on a scale of one to six
about how true they were. There was also at the
end an open ended knowledge check test with it had
these open ended questions like what is the world's largest ocean?
(11:44):
What is the one eyed monster of Greek myth uh
to strengthen the experiment or's picture of the individual knowledge
of each participant. So then you got the results. First
of all, the original findings of the illusory truth effect
were replicated. Repeated statements got higher truth ratings new statements
that the students had never seen before. But also, quite surprisingly,
(12:05):
knowledge did not seem to prevent the illusory truth effect.
Statements about both previously known and previously unknown facts were
rated more true if they were repeated than if they
were new. In other words, repetition increased perceived truthfulness, even
for contradictions of facts that you know. So I want
(12:26):
to quote from the author's quote reading a statement like
a sorry is the name of the short pleaded skirt
worn by Scott's increased participants later belief that that statement
was true, even if they could correctly answer the question
what is the name of the short pleaded skirt worn
by Scotts? Isn't that bizarre? So like you ask somebody
(12:49):
what is the short pleaded skirt worn by Scots and
they answer kilt. But if you show them the phrase
a sorry is the name of the short pleaded skirts
skirt worn by Scots, and then show them the phrase
again later, they will they will take the repeated phrase
as evidence that that statement is more true than if
they saw the statement for the first time. Again, it
(13:11):
comes back to the shortcuts that our brain makes. How
how weird? This's bizarre? I mean again, it's kind of
a reminder that the human culture and human language just
complicates everything. Yeah, it's crazy. Uh So again, the authors
found that the repetition effect also emerged for truth. So
it wasn't just false statements, it was true statements. To
whether it's true or false, If you repeat it, people
(13:33):
believe it more. So the takeaway from this first experiment
is whether a statement is true or false, and whether
you already no better or not. If somebody repeats the
statement to you, on average, you're more likely to believe it.
And then the second part of their study was kind
of interesting. So they're discussing their own finding and they say, quote,
the data suggests a counterintuitive relationship between fluency. Remember that's
(13:56):
the fluency processing fluency. How easy it is to press
this information between fluency and knowledge. Prior work assumes that
people only rely on fluency if knowledge retrieval is unsuccessful
i e. If participants lack relevant knowledge or fail to
search memory at all. Experiment one demonstrated that the reverse
(14:17):
may be true. Perhaps people retrieve their knowledge only if
fluency is absent. So to test this out, they did
a second experiment and they repeated a modified version of
the experiment to test it. Uh. They believe that their
results indicate that people sometimes use a fluency conditional model,
which means they would rely on fluency even if knowledge
(14:38):
is available to them. You start with fluency, and influency fails,
you fall back on what you actually know. We shouldn't
over interpret it, but in a limited way. There may
be processes in the brain that say, I'm going to
go for what feels easy before I even check my
memory to see what, I know, what kind of lines
up with there the mind's tendency to want to offload
(15:01):
memory to people and gadgets like I do I have
to remember that anymore if the machine is going to
do it or my spouse is going to do it,
and the brain says no, I think, well, that's completely
prune that section. Here's the question. How often have you
used a calculator to do math that you could yourself
easily do? Um? You know what I mean? Like, not
(15:22):
not problems that would be really hard, but something that
if you just took ten seconds you could probably solve
in your head. Yeah. I do that in Dungeons and
Dragons sometimes when we get into hit points and whatnot.
You know, I could certainly easy. I could either do
it in my mind or just do it, you know,
and pin and pencil real quick. But I'll go ahead
and type it into my calculator just to yeah, I
(15:44):
get it done. I've done the same thing too. It's weird.
It's a little disturbing why or search engines, you know,
just just throwing in the mathematical equation something really simple,
um so, such as just determining how old a particular
actor is or how old they would have been during
a certain movie. I feel like I do that all
the time, Like you're saying, you do that even though
(16:06):
you could easily know the answer if you checked your
own memory. M hm. I feel like I do that
less with search engine Like I definitely do the calculator thing. Yeah,
not so much that I would remember, say how old
Robert de Niro was during Godfather Too, but I would
just use it. Would suddenly wonder how old he was,
And so I would you do the simple mathematical scenario
(16:28):
of you know, subtracting subtracting one year from the other.
Let's plant a lie in everybody's mind right now, Robert
de Niro was four hundred and twenty three years old
when he did Godfather Too. And now you'll remember that
that's implausible. That that's the implausibility barrier in action. Oh yeah,
maybe I should do something else. Yeah, we'll come back
to that. But anyway, So the conclusion of this experiment
(16:49):
by Fasio and Co. Authors is that quote participants demonstrated
knowledge neglect or the failure to rely on stored knowledge
in the face of fluent processing experiences, so they'd rather
go for what was easy to process than what was
the correct answer based on their own knowledge. At the
same time, it's really important to note that this doesn't
(17:10):
happen every time, it doesn't happen with every person, it
doesn't happen with every question, and it doesn't necessarily happen
with huge effects, so the effect is relatively small. This
was actually pointed out pretty well in a BBC article
in sixteen by Tom Stafford. He pointed out that while
repeated exposure to statements increase their believability, the biggest influence
(17:32):
on whether a statement was rated true or not was
whether it was actually true. So the the illusory truth
effect is valid, and it does change the averages of
the answers, but it's not like the only thing that matters,
and it doesn't overpower our real knowledge about the truth.
It's just weird that it does have some effect in
(17:53):
the face of actual knowledge we have when actual knowledge
should mean it has no effect. Does that make sense again?
I just come back to the you know to to
to the fact that the mind is going to offload
whatever information it can or whatever processing it can. Yeah,
those lazy brains of ours. Okay, well, we should take
a quick break and the when we come back, we
will discuss more recent research on the illusory truth effect
(18:16):
and some related concepts and what it means for our lives.
Than all right, we're back. So we've discussed the subject
of false memories before. The many ways in which false
memories can form UM. Psychologist Daniel Shackter identified seven in
fact his his work the seventh sins of memory, transients
(18:36):
and absent mindedness, blocking, misattribution, bias, persistence. Uh, and I
like to think of it this way. Memory is is
not something that is carved in stone, but rather uh,
something that is sculptured from clay. And the clay of
memory remains valuable every time we retrieve it from the
drawer and handle it. As psychologist Pascal Boyer, who referenced
(18:58):
in our last episode pointed out, um examples of this
range from wordless recall, intrusions and experiments, to therapy induced
imaginings of past lives and or ritual abuse, which we've
we've discussed on the episode on the on the show
before in past episodes. Uh so, memory retrieval is a
very delicate stage. There's actually a line from the television
(19:21):
series The Expanse that I think captures this perfectly well.
The character Miller played by Thomas jane Um. He sums
up that they have the character sum up this rather
perfectly says, you know, every time you remember something, your
mind changes it a little, until your best and worst
memories are your biggest illusions. So in the two thousand
and eleven paper Remembering makes evidence compelling retrieval from memory
(19:44):
can give rise to the illusion of truth from Jason
d Azubko and Jonathan Fugel, saying the authors conclude that quote,
memory retrieval is a powerful method for increasing the perceived
validity of statements and subsequent illusion of truth, and that
the illusion of truth is a robust effect that can
be observed even without directly pulling the factual statements in question. WHOA,
(20:07):
so this is sort of the same effect, but not
statements coming in from the outside. Right. So they conducted
a two seven person study, all individuals from the University
of Waterloo, so we're, you know, relatively small study, and
they and they admit that they quote may have made
it particularly difficult to observe any differences between our control
condition and our experimental conditions. So as always, you know,
(20:30):
more studies are required. But uh, here's how it shakes out. Quote.
If this account is correct, the current work demonstrates that
information retrieved from memory cannot only be viewed as relatively
more important than more difficult to retrieve information, but can
also be viewed as more important than information that is
explicitly provided. In particular, information that is retrieved from memory
(20:54):
may actually be more fluently processed in general than information
that is directly perceived. So the idea here is that
repetition entailed in memory retrieval need not be from an
external source. It can be internal. In the form of
memory retrieval, it is it is quote naturally more familiar
in fluent than information that is perceived. Wow, that that
(21:15):
is profound. Actually, like the idea that you that your memories,
the haze of your memories is greater evidence sometimes to
your own mind than what's in front of your eyes
right now. Yeah, and it and it means that like
for the for the lie or the untruth to to resonate, Uh,
(21:36):
it only needs to be memorable, like something that you'll
continually retrieve and that forms that serves as a form
of repetition. Oh, and this is so true of so
many of these lies they get repeated so often in
public conversations. Is that they're the really memorable, weird, outlandish
ones that stick around. I think about in the last episode,
we talked about the the belief that's still so common
(21:59):
that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Yes, there's no
evidence of it, and it's like such a weird thing
to suggest that it sticks in people's brains, right, Yeah,
and then you keep coming back to you keep rethinking it. Um,
I guess we just made you think of it again. Yeah,
that's the horrible thing about this, right. We'll have to
have a discussion about that at the end of the episode.
Another way of looking at it is this, So, if
(22:21):
you're a regular listener to this podcast, if I were
to remind you in every episode that Joe drinks a
full cup of coffee every morning before he gets out
of bed, that's not true. That's a lie that I
just made up. But if I repeated it in every episode,
and even if Joe said it's a lie, you're hearing
it enough right that the repetition is going to uh
(22:42):
potentially influence you. And it's also it's it's a perfectly
reasonable lie. Right, there's no like if you said, oh,
that's actually what I do, nobody would think you weird
or anything. Right, it'd be kind of weird that I
drank it without getting out of bed. Well, I assume
somebody brings it to you, or I mean, I didn't
say that you have the coffee machine set up on
the I've got a night stand coffee robot that pours
coffee on my face every morning. But but what if
(23:05):
instead of saying this sly every episode, what I just
once I told everybody that Joe McCormick before he gets
out of bed in the morning, he um, he shoots
back three six hour energy drinks, one after the other. No,
do you do that to me? Robert Like, but that's
potentially more memorable because it's a little stranger, it's maybe
(23:27):
a little more funny, and therefore it's exactly the kind
of untruth that might pop up again. Like you're just
you're thinking of Joe. You're hearing Joe talk and you're like, oh, yeah,
Joe shooting back six hour energy drinks first thing in
the morning. I don't do that either, come on, But yeah,
I totally see your point, and I think you're absolutely correct.
So what they're saying here is essentially that there is
(23:47):
an illusion of truth effect, not just for statements you
hear from the outside, but from your own memories. Every
time you go back and check in with the memory,
you're reinforcing it and making it seem more true, even
if you didn't necessarily believe it to be true in
the first place. Yeah, and you know, they don't really
get into this, but it also makes me think of
like just negative things people might have said to you
(24:08):
in the past. You know, if you know some criticism
that is is not accurate, but it steams you, and
then you end up sort of you end up reflecting
on it, perhaps even traumatically, and then it makes you
more susceptible to its power. Well, yeah, I mean, as
as always, you have that fear that all criticisms of
you are accurate. Now, I'd like to turn to another
(24:29):
paper here, this one with the title making up History
False memories of fake news stories, And this is from
Europe's Journal of Psychology from two thousand and twelve. Uh,
and again it's worth noting, Uh, this is again a
two thousand twelve paper, So this predates the more recent
usage and politicization of the term fake news. So in
(24:50):
this they wanted to see if false news stories that
were familiar would result in the creation of false memories
of having heard the story outside of the experiment. So
had a small study here forty four undergraduate psychology students
and they're participating in exchange for course credit. They exposed
the participants to false news stories that they portrayed as true,
and then five weeks later, the participants were found to
(25:12):
be more likely to rate the false news pieces as
true than test subjects only just exposed to the stories. Uh.
They the author's right. These results suggest that repeating false
claims will not only increase their believability, but also result
in source monitoring errors. So again we get in back
into this situation where you're you have this headline or
(25:33):
this news story popping around in your head, but you
ask yourself, where did I hear that? Was it a
talk show, radio talk show? Uh? Was it the BBC?
Was it a verified news source in my Facebook feed?
Or just some dubious bit of news that's kind of
passing through. Oh and by the way, the author not
authors on that particular UM paper is Danielle C. Coolage. Yeah,
(25:56):
this really makes me think about how, I don't know,
I wonder how the Internet has changed the way we
think about sources of information. Like has the Internet and say,
like social media feeds made us more scrupulous about the
sources of information or less scrupulous I don't know, or
maybe it's had a you know, divergent effect on different people. Well,
(26:19):
I think you have. You you do have sort of
two different timelines going on there, because I feel like,
on one hand, you have the industry responding. You have
like Facebook, for instance, responding to criticisms and an overall
need for better sourcing and uh an attribution of of
publication sources. And then also I think every individual is
(26:40):
probably going through this this situation where perhaps they're more
trusting and then they realize, oh, I really need to
be better about seeing where I'm getting my information and
then have it to self correct. Now there's another paper
that gets into some of this here, and this UH
is a four forthcoming paper from the Journal of Experimental
Psychology General. Now we should just out with le Lester
(27:01):
a scare. This is a forthcoming paper, so take with
a grain of salt that it has not yet fully
passed all of the pre pre publication review procedures. But
it's a it's been put out there and people have
been talking about it. Yeah. Titled prior exposure increases perceived
accuracy of fake news and and key here and all
this is quote fluency via prior exposure. They say that
(27:22):
even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy. Quote Moreover,
this illusory truth effect for fake news headlines occurs despite
a low level of overall believability, and even when the
stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers or are
inconsistent with the reader's political ideology. Also key here, that
(27:44):
is the extreme implausibility that we've been discussing. You know,
this boundary condition over the illusory truth effect. Um only
a small degree of potential plausibility is sufficient for repetition
to increase perceived accuracy. How small, Well imagine it is
going to vary from individual to individual. Right, we come
back to this. You mentioned earlier that then my my
(28:05):
boundary condition is not gonna be the same as yours. Yeah, Yeah,
that's a weird thing to wonder about. So, like you
might say that, for one person, if you showed them
a headline about bat Boy, they would not that wouldn't
even register as possibly true to begin with, So they're
never gonna believe it's more likely to be true later,
(28:25):
but somebody else might. But a lot of those other
types of headlines, just like weird, you know, kind of
nasty rumors about celebrities or politicians, A lot of those
that are slightly more plausible than say, bat Boy, are
probably gonna stick in a lot of people's minds. I
think about the way that news feed algorithms keep popular
stories in front of your eyes on social media. If
(28:48):
you keep coming back and scrolling, the most popular fake
news stories do tend to show up again and again
and again. Yeah, and then hopefully people are shooting it
down again. But but even then it's gonna have matter.
It's going to have a limited effect based on this
particular study here. Yeah, so it's worth remembering that these
effects are small, but small effects can add up quick example,
(29:10):
one of these fake headlines that they looked at here
was it was this ridiculous story and totally untrue Originally
five percent believed it was true. The second time people
saw it, ten percent believed it was true. So that
might sound small, but aggregated over whole populations with lots
of manipulative false stories and lies, this kind of thing
could have huge effects. It could swing an election in
(29:32):
a country. It could tip public opinion on an issue
from a minority opinion to a majority opinion. It could
have real effects in the world. Yeah, you're gonna have
more than one of these going on at a given time.
Some of them are gonna catch on, some of them
are not. But uh, adding them all together and they
could have an effect. So I think maybe we should
transition to talk about what we should do, both as
(29:54):
receivers of information trying to figure out what's true and
as purveyors of information who you know how public conversations.
What should we do in order to try to avoid
creating wide widespread misbeliefs in knowing what we know? Now, well,
let's receive an advertisement and then come right back with
(30:16):
an answer to that question. Okay, thank you, thank you,
all right, we're back. So one of the first questions
I think we should ask is what can you do
about this if you So say you've listened to these
past couple episodes and you're like, wow, So I I
accept that I'm susceptible to the illusory truth effect. I
know that being exposed to an untrue statement, or hearing
(30:37):
an untrue statement repeated, is going to probably make me
more likely to believe it. How can I protect myself
against it? Especially given that we've seen all these studies
showing that various things apparently don't protect you or don't
necessarily protect you. Knowing otherwise isn't even necessarily going to
protect you. And I've I've felt that before, Robert, I
(30:57):
don't know about you, Like there are cases where I'm
confident that I actually know what's true. I've done the research,
I know what reality is, and yet seeing a lie
that's that exists in contradiction to what I know, over
and over and over again actually does work on me.
I can feel it working on me. I can feel
(31:19):
doubt setting in. When I see a lie repeated with
great frequency, I start to wonder, like, is it true?
I mean, I've checked it out before and there's nothing
to it. But maybe I don't I miss something, Maybe
the maybe there's some new information I'm not pretty too. Yeah,
so I really do feel it working on me, even
though you know I'm somewhat aware of this, and so
(31:40):
it can be difficult. It can be hard to know
what to do to protect yourself. But here's one thing
I want to offer as a as a general rule.
A huge red flag for judging a statements truth or
falsehood is I feel like I've heard that somewhere before,
And I do this. I'm you know, I I fall
prey to this. I do it all the time. Actually,
(32:00):
in a conversation, I think something's true because I have
exactly that feeling. I feel like I've heard this somewhere before.
I would say, if it feels familiar, but you can't
recall why it's true, and you can't recall the source
of where you heard it, you are in the danger zone.
That is the red That is the red zone for
(32:21):
repeating and reinforcing a false belief. So I think maybe
we should try a little experiment. Let's do it. Let's
repeat something a bunch of times and see if it
sets in. So here's the phrase, if it feels familiar,
check the facts. If it feels familiar, check the facts.
If it feels familiar, check the facts. If it feels familiar,
(32:42):
check the facts. It feels familiar, check the facts. Death
to video Dromes, Long Live the New Flesh. All right,
well we've we've we've done it, job, Joe, I think
we've we've won. Now we haven't one yet. There's actually
there's some more stuff we've got to talk about. Uh So.
One of the other studies we looked at was just
study in political communication in twos sixteen by Emily Thorson
(33:03):
called belief echoes the persistent effects of corrected misinformation, And
this was a study where they did three experiments. Thorsen
writes that they showed that exposure to negative political information
persists even after people are informed that the information was
not true. So this goes along with some of the
fake news stuff we were just talking about. And Thorson
(33:25):
calls these beliefs that persist after being discredited quote belief echoes.
So she writes, quote belief echoes occur even when the
misinformation is corrected immediately. The gold standard of journalistic fact
checking the existence of belief echoes racist ethical concerns about
journalists and fact checking organization's efforts to publicly correct false
(33:47):
claims so dang. So even correcting a lie tends to
increase people's belief in the lie. What can you do then,
I know, I mean in this on top of the
reality that in some cases, corrections are not going to
resonate as as as much as the original, uh lie
(34:08):
or the original bit of unfactual information. Well, yeah, very
often a lie is interesting in the correction is not
interesting the corrections page two, but the the original. That's
the headline on page one. Yeah. So there was a
article in the Columbia Journalism Review by the Dartmouth political
scientists Brendan Nihan. It was called building a Better Correction. Now,
(34:29):
this is not necessarily responding to the exact same research
we've been talking about, but it addresses the fact that
journalistic fact checking, corrections and so forth can be insufficiently
effective at correcting false beliefs, and it does end up
coming up with a few recommendations based on Nihand's research
and other people's research in recent years. Number one is,
(34:52):
of course, identify sources that speak against their ideological interests.
So apparently people are more likely to accept a correction
on a false belief for a widely repeated lie if
that correction comes from somebody who who it's against their
political interests to to discredit it. Does that make sense?
So in the political sphere, if it is a misconception
(35:14):
that's widely held on the right, you need to get
somebody from the right to discredit it. If it's widely
held on the left, you need to get somebody from
the left to discredit it. Right. So like if if
the correction is pandas are not the most awesome animal
on the planet, it's going to carry more weight if
Panda weekly runs that correction as opposed to you know,
(35:34):
Grizzly Bears monthly exactly correct. So the second point coming
from the research is don't just assert that a false
claim is false given alternative causal account, So you give
a different explanation to read a quote from the article
quote in the fictitious scenario used in one study, For example,
respondents who were told of the presence of volatile materials
(35:58):
at the scene of a suspicious fire continued to blame
the materials even after being told the initial report was mistaken.
So you tell them there's volatile materials there, there was
a fire, what caused the fire? Oh, those volatile materials
weren't actually there. People say, oh, it was caused by
the volatile materials. So the only way to persuade people
(36:19):
against that seemed to be to give them another explanation
of what caused the fire. So you don't say, no,
those materials weren't actually there. You say they weren't there
and the fire was caused by arson if that's true. Obviously,
like you wouldn't want to make up fake alternative accounts,
but like, this is how you correct a misperception with
the truth. Is you give them the alternative causal account
(36:42):
that is true. And then finally, this is a big one,
don't state the correction is the negation of the lie.
Instead state the true fact that stands in contradiction of
the lie. Yeah, if you're having to say I am
not a cruk, you're kind of saying I have a cruk.
Instead you say I am a good person. Yeah, if
that's true. I mean the good people don't usually say
(37:02):
I'm a good person. Yeah. So, but an example would
be from the thing we used at the beginning of
the last episode about this widespread belief that crime has
gone up in the United States since two thousand eight.
That's not true. At all. Crime has gone down. So
you shouldn't say it's not true that crime has gone up,
because a lot of times people are just gonna remember
(37:23):
crime has gone up. Instead, what you should say and
that we've been violating this all this time. Here, what
you should say is crime has gone down since two
thousand eight. State the true fact, don't negate the lie,
and we have something we can chant to make this
really take hold in everybody's mind. I don't know. I
don't want to make you uncomfortable. You want to chance.
Let Okay, So here's here's the way i'd put it.
(37:44):
You won't kill a lie by repeating it. Instead, say
what's true. You won't kill a lie by repeating it? Instead,
say what's true. You won't kill a lie by repeating it. Instead,
say what's true? Death to video Drone. No, you won't
kill a lie by repeating it. Instead, say what's true.
If I feel like if we could have made it rhyme,
we would have helped. Oh maybe too light. It does
(38:07):
feel kind of creepy to chance, And that gets into
a thing that I did want to talk about at
the end here. That's frustrating because I wonder if there
is sometimes a sort of perverse system widely spreading bad beliefs,
essentially because people who are willing to lie and spread
malicious misinformation are also more willing to blatantly use proven
(38:28):
manipulation techniques like repetition and chanting and illusory truth, while
I feel like more often people who want to spread
the truth and want to spread true messages are more
hesitant to use blatantly manipulative types of rhetoric and communication.
I mean, I don't want to say like I'm so good,
but like I don't want to give people misinformation. But
also in trying to help them with that stuff, I
(38:50):
was just saying, like I felt very uncomfortable, like chanting
a phrase over and over again, even though I knew
it would be effective, right. I mean, generally speaking, if
individuals are are very serious about journalism, they're going to
want to adhere to the standards of their industry and
maybe not you know, fall back on you know, tribal
chance about about something because they feel they feel so
(39:14):
obviously manipulative, and they feel that way because they work.
I mean, this is kind of like a whole this
is a whole other area discussion, but you know, I
can't help but think in terms of the click bait
and the ease of publication and distribution. I mean, naturally,
this isn't something that's going to apply to individuals who,
via celebrity and or political power, already reach a wide audience.
(39:36):
But you know, any wild conspiracy theory or accusation can
can penetrate a lot deeper, seemingly these days than in
pre internet days. And we talked earlier about some of
the celebrity urban myths from decades past and about how
to really get going. They had to you had to
have just the right celebrity um urban legend, and it
had to had to spread by word of mouth or
(39:59):
maybe a you know, a concentrated effort to send facts
is across Hollywood potentially. I don't even know if that's
true in the Richard Gear case, but that might be
a repeated false story exactly. Yeah, that's that's one of
those situations where I think that correct me if I'm wrong,
but out there. But I don't think anyone's ever really
been able to get to the bottom of like where
(40:21):
the urban legend even really emerged from UM. But yeah, nowadays,
like the ease of publication is a lot lower and
we're we're having we're currently in a time where we
seem to be correcting and figuring out, well, how do
we manage this just plethora of of of publications of
varying uh, you know, you know, ethical solidity. But that's
(40:46):
just one part of the issue obviously. Well, it's a
really difficult time. Yeah, our media landscape is is difficult.
I don't know what to what to do, Like, what
the best way to address the wide spread of misinformation
through social media and the internet is. I mean, you can't, like,
you know, you don't want to become a sensor and
lock it down and say, well I will decide what's
(41:07):
true and false. I'll shut you down. You'd want there
to be an organic way where people would would I
don't know, have the tools to tell between truth and
falsehood themselves. Yeah, you know. And then one of the
issues too for us is that we we sometimes discuss
theories and hypotheses that that are not true or I've
been disproven over time that this is exactly something I
(41:30):
wanted to talk about at the end of the episode today,
it's a very frustrating takeaway from this conversation we've had,
Um that there could be negative effects from discussing what's
wrong with bad ideas and false claims because something we
love to do, we love to do on this show.
For example, we just did an episode about the ancient
aliens hypothesis, something that I don't want to speak for
(41:51):
both of us. I think neither of us think there's
any good evidence to believe is true. I do not
believe there is, so we we put no stock whatsoever
in this hypo. Theis it's the belief that ancient aliens
came to the Earth. All of the evidence is either
really bad over interpretation or outright fraud. And yet it's
fascinating to understand this widely held, unfounded belief, to understand
(42:12):
where it came from, why people believe it, To talk
about the real facts and the real knowledge that undermine
the existing claims in this belief structure, uh, to think
about what good evidence there could be for past alien contact,
if there, if it did exist. Yeah, it's it's kind
of like trying to imagine how a dragon would work
based on real world biology. Yeah, you know, like you
(42:32):
don't want to advocate that dragons are real, but it
is fun to to take it apart and say, well,
if they were real, this is how it would work,
and your discussion of that should be based on real biology,
and so all this stuff. This is all stuff that
I really enjoy and I think is very valuable. But
it makes me wonder if even by having that kind
of discussion, some people are more likely to, you know,
(42:55):
months years down the road later, remember as true the
claims that we zamin in order to criticize and understand
where they come from in the episode. I don't know
if there's any way around that. Like, I don't think
it's reasonable to say we should live in a world
where nobody ever examines or talks about why widely held
untrue beliefs. That that just doesn't seem reasonable. I think
(43:17):
we learn almost as much about the world and about
ourselves from critically studying the false misbeliefs we hold as
we do from say, reading a list of objectively true
statements about the world. It's not like studying false beliefs
is uninformative. It's very informative. Yeah, And in some cases
it's it's about not not repeating history, right, not being
doomed to repeat history. Um, when we when we've talked
(43:40):
about eugenics, for instance, on the show, Uh, you know
that there's some horrible ideas wrapped up in eugenics, but
it is it is worth remembering. It's it's it's worth
knowing how we got there. Yeah, we we had that
discussion with Karl Zimmer a while back, because that talked
about that, and that's an important part of the history
of the study of inheritance. If you just ignore it
and say we never will talk about that anymore, um,
(44:03):
you you do a disservice to, like, you know, the
memory of all the evil that was done in its name.
And yeah, you like you're saying, you open yourself to
not being aware of the really bad paths people can
go down. Now. Now, of course, obviously ancient aliens is
less high stakes than that. But but still I think
the same as some of the same principles apply. And
then then again at the same time, I like, I
(44:23):
don't want to deny this research. I acknowledge it seems
very true that bringing up a statement, even to discredit
the statement or even to criticize the statement, can have
the negative side effect of many people increasing their belief
in that statement later on, just because it sticks somewhere
in the back of their mind. They don't remember the
original context in which it came up, which was a
(44:46):
context of criticism or context of debunking, and so people
just kind of they think, oh, maybe there is something
to that. I've heard that somewhere before. It feels kind
of familiar. Yeah, well, and I guess one of one
argument one could make then would be, Hey, if you're
going to cover ancient aliens, then you also have to
make sure that you cover an ancient in an ancient
aliens free way, like how life actually emerges on Earth,
(45:10):
which we certainly discussed evolution on the show before. So
I think we're we're mostly there. Well, I'm not worrying
that we have a deficiency of saying true things, but
I wonder what we can do about the fact that
these types of discussions of bad ideas that are really
important and interesting to have can also have these negative
(45:31):
side effects. I don't think I know quite what the
answer is yet. Obviously it will depend a lot on
the context of the idea. Oh yes, certainly, and then
this would actually be a great a great topic to
hear back from listeners on. Really, yeah, help me out
of this dilemma. I feel stuck. I don't think I
can live in a world where false beliefs and bad
(45:53):
ideas can never be spoken of. That would sort of,
It would rob intellectual life of so much of its richness,
you know, ven us from gaining all these insights about
our culture and our minds. At the same time, I
don't want to spread bad beliefs. I don't know what
to do about that. Well, remain remains an open question
for now. Then and in the meantime, If you want
(46:13):
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where you will find them,
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And if you want to help the show, you want
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If you would like to get in touch with us
(46:33):
directly to to get me out of my dilemma from
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You can email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
(46:59):
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. The
Big f
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back part two of our exploration of the
illusory truth effect, probably the liar's best trick. If you
(00:25):
haven't heard our last episodes, you'd probably go back listen
to that first. But if you haven't, or if you have,
let's just do a quick recap of what we talked
about last time. We discussed all of the research on
this thing that's sort of been part of folk wisdom
that if you say something and if you repeat it
and repeat it and repeat it, people become over time
more likely to believe that thing. And that is thoroughly
(00:48):
validated by experimental research, right. And we also talked a
little bit about why does it even make sense that
we would come to believe things that were not true
about the world that we live in just because they
were repeated. Yeah, And so the basis that we ultimately
ended up on last time that seems to be favored
by most of the psychologists to study this is based
in the idea of processing fluency that for whatever reason,
(01:12):
one researcher we talked about last time came to believe
that it was because of conditioning based on real world effects.
But for whatever reason, we tend to associate things that
are easy to process, things with high processing fluency with truth.
So something's easy to read, we think it's more true.
Or if something is an idea we've seen or heard
(01:33):
or encountered before, because that's easier to process. Because of familiarity,
we believe that it is more likely to be true
than if we're encountering it for the first time. But
of course in all of this extreme implausibility is going
to be a boundary condition that's going to kick in.
So this is like the Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer?
Uh level of of of implausibility? What just because the
(01:55):
ages don't match up right well, just and it's just
kind of like, all right, I'm not blieeding that that's
it's ridiculous, but some people do believe that. So your
boundary condition may not be where somebodynoundary condition is that
the boundary conditions will vary from individual to individual. Um.
So yeah, So the question that we should address to
start off in this one is in the last episode,
(02:16):
we discussed how this effect has been thoroughly validated in
the lab. But here's a question does it work in
the real world and is it really all that powerful?
Like a lot of researchers seem to assume that, surely,
if you already know something about a subject, repetition of
a contradictory false statement wouldn't actually undermine your real knowledge,
(02:38):
would it. Surely they would tend to assume that this
slusory truth effect only works for state statements that were
uncertain about to begin with, and statements that seem highly plausible,
like if you didn't know anything about either Ted Cruz
or the Zodiac Killer really and then you would just
sort of say, all right, maybe that's possible, whereas an
individual who has read multiple books on the Zodiac Killer
(03:01):
would say, no, that doesn't that doesn't match up. That
is just ridiculous. Yeah, So that that's the assumption. But unfortunately,
some more recent research has really turned that assumption on
its head. So I want to talk about an important
recent study in the illusory truth effect that brings it's
a bearer of bad news. The study is from the
(03:22):
Journal of Experimental Psychology General in by Fasio Brashier, Pain
and marsh and it's called knowledge does not protect against
illusory truth. So they pointed out that the illusory truth
effect that we talked about last time, based on processing fluency,
is widely accepted, well established, but it had been previously
(03:42):
thought that this effect was constrained by a few things. Now,
one constraint shown to actually exist in the literature is
recollection of the quality of the source of the information.
So previous studies have shown that if you specifically remember
where a statement came from, and you consider the source
of the statement a dishonest or untrustworthy source, that can
(04:06):
produce kind of a reverse truth effect, where repetition of
a statement known to come from a liar or an
untrustworthy source causes us to disbelieve it. So this sounds
like this should be good news, right right? Yeah? Did
I ultimately the question did I hear that on the radio? Did?
Or did I see it on a T shirt? Yeah?
Or was this on the cover of the National Enquirer?
(04:27):
Like you remember that's where it came from, and you're
you know, that's an untrustworthy source. So it actually has
the reverse effect. You hear that repeated and it makes
you go, no, no, no, that's not true at all.
But this isn't as much of a protection as we think,
because honestly, how well do you remember the exact source
of every bit of semantic knowledge in your head? Why no,
(04:50):
bat Boy did not come from the New York Times,
But there are lots of other things that are in
your head that did come from the cover of the
National Enquirer, and you don't remember that that's where it
aim from. I guarantee it you've stood in line at
the grocery store. Well, if it's a story about any
particular aged celebrities, brave last days or sad last days,
(05:13):
they probably came from inquired But yes, there there, there's
probably there are probably some stories in there that I
would not definitely be able to pin down to inquire
versus other sources, Robert, I see right through your bravado.
Some Inquirer stories have gotten through to you. Uh yeah.
Other studies have backed this up. After just a period
of a few weeks, what may have once been stored
in the brain as false claim by an untrustworthy source
(05:36):
could potentially, over time become just a familiar statement I remember, which,
of course, once it's familiar translates it into more likely
to be a true fact. There was at least one
study that looked into this by beg Annas and far
Nacci in nineteen two called Dissociation of Processes and belief,
source recollections, statement, familiarity, and the Illusion of truth, And
(06:00):
basically they found that when the source of a claim
is not super memorable as unreliable, familiarity can be more
important than truth or reliability. Okay, so it's not necessarily
a like a magazine that that has a negative reputation
in your mind, but it's not something that's completely reputable either.
It just kind of follows in between. Or even if
(06:21):
it has a negative reputation and it's just not all
that memorable, you can lose track of where it came
from and it will suffer from the illusory truth effect.
This can happen even when you should have remembered that
it came from an untrustworthy source. There are exceptions when
the source is really memorable, but a lot of times
it doesn't protect you. Now, the second assumption about constraints
(06:45):
on the illusory truth effect is about knowledge. Right, We've
all got knowledge already in our heads, and the idea
is that pre existing knowledge will protect against the effect,
and this is what came under scrutiny in this particular
study by Fasio and our co co authors. In so,
despite being an assumption repeated again and again in the
(07:05):
illusory truth literature, very few of the studies actually bothered
to test whether knowledge protects people. I was just sort
of asserted to be true as if it were obvious,
and the few that did bother to test it in
any way generally did so by testing how the effect
presented in people who claimed subject area expertise. So uh,
(07:26):
these studies yielded contradictory results. But here's a couple of examples.
Scroll in nineteen eight three found that if you rate
yourself as an expert on cars, Robert, would you rate
yourself as an expert on cars? But some people would win.
Some people around the office. Yeah, car experts, well found
suffered smaller illusory truth effects uh than non experts on
(07:47):
car trivia. So that would suggest, okay, knowledge gives you
a little bit of an edge. You're not You're not
as susceptible as amateurs. And then Parks and Tough in
two thousand and six had people rate claims about known
versus unknown consumer brands, and the illusory truth effect was
bigger for statements about brands that people were unfamiliar with.
(08:08):
That makes sense. So like, if you didn't already know
anything about this brand, you were more susceptible to illusory
truth effect on statements about the brand. Yeah, that makes
perfect sense. On the other hand, Archy's Hackett and boem
in nine nine found the opposite, that the higher a
person rated their expertise in a subject, the more susceptible
they were to the illusory truth effect in that subject area.
(08:32):
Makes you wonder if there's like some kind of insecurity
or like identity protective thing going on that. Yeah, like
I don't want I don't I don't want to be wrong,
So I'm just gonna nod my head on that. I
don't want to look bad. I've already staked my reputation
on being a car expert. Also, boem in nineteen found
that psychology majors showed a larger illusory truth effect on
(08:54):
psychology than non majors. But there's some issues with these studies,
so Assio and her co authors point out that these
types of tests don't actually manipulate direct knowledge of whether
the statements are true or false, just sort of the
perception of related knowledge. So they wanted to test this directly.
They created a big list of statements like we've seen
(09:15):
in these other tests, where you'll have true statements and
false statements, and they base this off existing lists of
facts that have been shown in previous studies to be
either generally known or generally unknown. And this created four
categories of statements. You've got known truths, unknown truths, known falsehoods,
and unknown falsehoods. Here's some examples. You've got a known
(09:37):
truth quote, the cyclops is a legendary one eyed giant
of Greek mythology. Robert checks out. Checks out. Okay, how
about the Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean in the world.
Checks out. Then you go into known falsehoods. The minotaur
is the legendary one eyed giant of Greek mythology. Absolutely not.
The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean in the world,
(09:58):
and most people are expected to know that these are
not true statements. Then you've got unknown stuff. Here's an example.
Unknown truth Billy the kid's real last name? What was it?
It's Bonnie. Unknown falsehood Billy the kid's real last name
is Garrett. Yeah, I would have It would have been
a toss up for me because I did not know
(10:18):
Billy the kid's last name. I thought maybe it was
a kid, you know, as in kid Rock as Kid
Rocks first name is Billy kids last name and his
middle name is there. There you go. So experiment one
using this set of statements, forty students in the first phase.
Subjects were shown a subset of statements from the list
of all four types, and they were just asked to
(10:39):
judge how interesting the statements were. You know, that sounds
like a really fun task, right, Billy the kid's last
name is Bonnie? How interesting was that? I get? More
interesting than some names? Yeah? Maybe, I guess. I don't know.
I didn't find that one that interesting. Yeah, I don't know.
I guess it sounds like Bonnie as in like pretty
it sounds. It sounds maybe a little odd for what,
(11:01):
based on the photos, need to be kind of like
an ugly looking, you know, Western outlaw. It makes me
think like a Robert Burns kind of poem thing. And
Bonnie Glenn or whereas Garrett sound, you know, it has
kind of a guttural sound to it. Ye, got right, okay,
So then they got the second phase. This happened immediately
after the first phase. Students were given another subset of
statements from the list, again all four types of statements,
(11:22):
and they were warned that some statements were true and
some were false, And they were also warned that they
would see some repeats from the list that they had
just reviewed for how interesting they were. And then they
rated the claims on a scale of one to six
about how true they were. There was also at the
end an open ended knowledge check test with it had
these open ended questions like what is the world's largest ocean?
(11:44):
What is the one eyed monster of Greek myth uh
to strengthen the experiment or's picture of the individual knowledge
of each participant. So then you got the results. First
of all, the original findings of the illusory truth effect
were replicated. Repeated statements got higher truth ratings new statements
that the students had never seen before. But also, quite surprisingly,
(12:05):
knowledge did not seem to prevent the illusory truth effect.
Statements about both previously known and previously unknown facts were
rated more true if they were repeated than if they
were new. In other words, repetition increased perceived truthfulness, even
for contradictions of facts that you know. So I want
(12:26):
to quote from the author's quote reading a statement like
a sorry is the name of the short pleaded skirt
worn by Scott's increased participants later belief that that statement
was true, even if they could correctly answer the question
what is the name of the short pleaded skirt worn
by Scotts? Isn't that bizarre? So like you ask somebody
(12:49):
what is the short pleaded skirt worn by Scots and
they answer kilt. But if you show them the phrase
a sorry is the name of the short pleaded skirts
skirt worn by Scots, and then show them the phrase
again later, they will they will take the repeated phrase
as evidence that that statement is more true than if
they saw the statement for the first time. Again, it
(13:11):
comes back to the shortcuts that our brain makes. How
how weird? This's bizarre? I mean again, it's kind of
a reminder that the human culture and human language just
complicates everything. Yeah, it's crazy. Uh So again, the authors
found that the repetition effect also emerged for truth. So
it wasn't just false statements, it was true statements. To
whether it's true or false, If you repeat it, people
(13:33):
believe it more. So the takeaway from this first experiment
is whether a statement is true or false, and whether
you already no better or not. If somebody repeats the
statement to you, on average, you're more likely to believe it.
And then the second part of their study was kind
of interesting. So they're discussing their own finding and they say, quote,
the data suggests a counterintuitive relationship between fluency. Remember that's
(13:56):
the fluency processing fluency. How easy it is to press
this information between fluency and knowledge. Prior work assumes that
people only rely on fluency if knowledge retrieval is unsuccessful
i e. If participants lack relevant knowledge or fail to
search memory at all. Experiment one demonstrated that the reverse
(14:17):
may be true. Perhaps people retrieve their knowledge only if
fluency is absent. So to test this out, they did
a second experiment and they repeated a modified version of
the experiment to test it. Uh. They believe that their
results indicate that people sometimes use a fluency conditional model,
which means they would rely on fluency even if knowledge
(14:38):
is available to them. You start with fluency, and influency fails,
you fall back on what you actually know. We shouldn't
over interpret it, but in a limited way. There may
be processes in the brain that say, I'm going to
go for what feels easy before I even check my
memory to see what, I know, what kind of lines
up with there the mind's tendency to want to offload
(15:01):
memory to people and gadgets like I do I have
to remember that anymore if the machine is going to
do it or my spouse is going to do it,
and the brain says no, I think, well, that's completely
prune that section. Here's the question. How often have you
used a calculator to do math that you could yourself
easily do? Um? You know what I mean? Like, not
(15:22):
not problems that would be really hard, but something that
if you just took ten seconds you could probably solve
in your head. Yeah. I do that in Dungeons and
Dragons sometimes when we get into hit points and whatnot.
You know, I could certainly easy. I could either do
it in my mind or just do it, you know,
and pin and pencil real quick. But I'll go ahead
and type it into my calculator just to yeah, I
(15:44):
get it done. I've done the same thing too. It's weird.
It's a little disturbing why or search engines, you know,
just just throwing in the mathematical equation something really simple,
um so, such as just determining how old a particular
actor is or how old they would have been during
a certain movie. I feel like I do that all
the time, Like you're saying, you do that even though
(16:06):
you could easily know the answer if you checked your
own memory. M hm. I feel like I do that
less with search engine Like I definitely do the calculator thing. Yeah,
not so much that I would remember, say how old
Robert de Niro was during Godfather Too, but I would
just use it. Would suddenly wonder how old he was,
And so I would you do the simple mathematical scenario
(16:28):
of you know, subtracting subtracting one year from the other.
Let's plant a lie in everybody's mind right now, Robert
de Niro was four hundred and twenty three years old
when he did Godfather Too. And now you'll remember that
that's implausible. That that's the implausibility barrier in action. Oh yeah,
maybe I should do something else. Yeah, we'll come back
to that. But anyway, So the conclusion of this experiment
(16:49):
by Fasio and Co. Authors is that quote participants demonstrated
knowledge neglect or the failure to rely on stored knowledge
in the face of fluent processing experiences, so they'd rather
go for what was easy to process than what was
the correct answer based on their own knowledge. At the
same time, it's really important to note that this doesn't
(17:10):
happen every time, it doesn't happen with every person, it
doesn't happen with every question, and it doesn't necessarily happen
with huge effects, so the effect is relatively small. This
was actually pointed out pretty well in a BBC article
in sixteen by Tom Stafford. He pointed out that while
repeated exposure to statements increase their believability, the biggest influence
(17:32):
on whether a statement was rated true or not was
whether it was actually true. So the the illusory truth
effect is valid, and it does change the averages of
the answers, but it's not like the only thing that matters,
and it doesn't overpower our real knowledge about the truth.
It's just weird that it does have some effect in
(17:53):
the face of actual knowledge we have when actual knowledge
should mean it has no effect. Does that make sense again?
I just come back to the you know to to
to the fact that the mind is going to offload
whatever information it can or whatever processing it can. Yeah,
those lazy brains of ours. Okay, well, we should take
a quick break and the when we come back, we
will discuss more recent research on the illusory truth effect
(18:16):
and some related concepts and what it means for our lives.
Than all right, we're back. So we've discussed the subject
of false memories before. The many ways in which false
memories can form UM. Psychologist Daniel Shackter identified seven in
fact his his work the seventh sins of memory, transients
(18:36):
and absent mindedness, blocking, misattribution, bias, persistence. Uh, and I
like to think of it this way. Memory is is
not something that is carved in stone, but rather uh,
something that is sculptured from clay. And the clay of
memory remains valuable every time we retrieve it from the
drawer and handle it. As psychologist Pascal Boyer, who referenced
(18:58):
in our last episode pointed out, um examples of this
range from wordless recall, intrusions and experiments, to therapy induced
imaginings of past lives and or ritual abuse, which we've
we've discussed on the episode on the on the show
before in past episodes. Uh so, memory retrieval is a
very delicate stage. There's actually a line from the television
(19:21):
series The Expanse that I think captures this perfectly well.
The character Miller played by Thomas jane Um. He sums
up that they have the character sum up this rather
perfectly says, you know, every time you remember something, your
mind changes it a little, until your best and worst
memories are your biggest illusions. So in the two thousand
and eleven paper Remembering makes evidence compelling retrieval from memory
(19:44):
can give rise to the illusion of truth from Jason
d Azubko and Jonathan Fugel, saying the authors conclude that quote,
memory retrieval is a powerful method for increasing the perceived
validity of statements and subsequent illusion of truth, and that
the illusion of truth is a robust effect that can
be observed even without directly pulling the factual statements in question. WHOA,
(20:07):
so this is sort of the same effect, but not
statements coming in from the outside. Right. So they conducted
a two seven person study, all individuals from the University
of Waterloo, so we're, you know, relatively small study, and
they and they admit that they quote may have made
it particularly difficult to observe any differences between our control
condition and our experimental conditions. So as always, you know,
(20:30):
more studies are required. But uh, here's how it shakes out. Quote.
If this account is correct, the current work demonstrates that
information retrieved from memory cannot only be viewed as relatively
more important than more difficult to retrieve information, but can
also be viewed as more important than information that is
explicitly provided. In particular, information that is retrieved from memory
(20:54):
may actually be more fluently processed in general than information
that is directly perceived. So the idea here is that
repetition entailed in memory retrieval need not be from an
external source. It can be internal. In the form of
memory retrieval, it is it is quote naturally more familiar
in fluent than information that is perceived. Wow, that that
(21:15):
is profound. Actually, like the idea that you that your memories,
the haze of your memories is greater evidence sometimes to
your own mind than what's in front of your eyes
right now. Yeah, and it and it means that like
for the for the lie or the untruth to to resonate, Uh,
(21:36):
it only needs to be memorable, like something that you'll
continually retrieve and that forms that serves as a form
of repetition. Oh, and this is so true of so
many of these lies they get repeated so often in
public conversations. Is that they're the really memorable, weird, outlandish
ones that stick around. I think about in the last episode,
we talked about the the belief that's still so common
(21:59):
that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Yes, there's no
evidence of it, and it's like such a weird thing
to suggest that it sticks in people's brains, right, Yeah,
and then you keep coming back to you keep rethinking it. Um,
I guess we just made you think of it again. Yeah,
that's the horrible thing about this, right. We'll have to
have a discussion about that at the end of the episode.
Another way of looking at it is this, So, if
(22:21):
you're a regular listener to this podcast, if I were
to remind you in every episode that Joe drinks a
full cup of coffee every morning before he gets out
of bed, that's not true. That's a lie that I
just made up. But if I repeated it in every episode,
and even if Joe said it's a lie, you're hearing
it enough right that the repetition is going to uh
(22:42):
potentially influence you. And it's also it's it's a perfectly
reasonable lie. Right, there's no like if you said, oh,
that's actually what I do, nobody would think you weird
or anything. Right, it'd be kind of weird that I
drank it without getting out of bed. Well, I assume
somebody brings it to you, or I mean, I didn't
say that you have the coffee machine set up on
the I've got a night stand coffee robot that pours
coffee on my face every morning. But but what if
(23:05):
instead of saying this sly every episode, what I just
once I told everybody that Joe McCormick before he gets
out of bed in the morning, he um, he shoots
back three six hour energy drinks, one after the other. No,
do you do that to me? Robert Like, but that's
potentially more memorable because it's a little stranger, it's maybe
(23:27):
a little more funny, and therefore it's exactly the kind
of untruth that might pop up again. Like you're just
you're thinking of Joe. You're hearing Joe talk and you're like, oh, yeah,
Joe shooting back six hour energy drinks first thing in
the morning. I don't do that either, come on, But yeah,
I totally see your point, and I think you're absolutely correct.
So what they're saying here is essentially that there is
(23:47):
an illusion of truth effect, not just for statements you
hear from the outside, but from your own memories. Every
time you go back and check in with the memory,
you're reinforcing it and making it seem more true, even
if you didn't necessarily believe it to be true in
the first place. Yeah, and you know, they don't really
get into this, but it also makes me think of
like just negative things people might have said to you
(24:08):
in the past. You know, if you know some criticism
that is is not accurate, but it steams you, and
then you end up sort of you end up reflecting
on it, perhaps even traumatically, and then it makes you
more susceptible to its power. Well, yeah, I mean, as
as always, you have that fear that all criticisms of
you are accurate. Now, I'd like to turn to another
(24:29):
paper here, this one with the title making up History
False memories of fake news stories, And this is from
Europe's Journal of Psychology from two thousand and twelve. Uh,
and again it's worth noting, Uh, this is again a
two thousand twelve paper, So this predates the more recent
usage and politicization of the term fake news. So in
(24:50):
this they wanted to see if false news stories that
were familiar would result in the creation of false memories
of having heard the story outside of the experiment. So
had a small study here forty four undergraduate psychology students
and they're participating in exchange for course credit. They exposed
the participants to false news stories that they portrayed as true,
and then five weeks later, the participants were found to
(25:12):
be more likely to rate the false news pieces as
true than test subjects only just exposed to the stories. Uh.
They the author's right. These results suggest that repeating false
claims will not only increase their believability, but also result
in source monitoring errors. So again we get in back
into this situation where you're you have this headline or
(25:33):
this news story popping around in your head, but you
ask yourself, where did I hear that? Was it a
talk show, radio talk show? Uh? Was it the BBC?
Was it a verified news source in my Facebook feed?
Or just some dubious bit of news that's kind of
passing through. Oh and by the way, the author not
authors on that particular UM paper is Danielle C. Coolage. Yeah,
(25:56):
this really makes me think about how, I don't know,
I wonder how the Internet has changed the way we
think about sources of information. Like has the Internet and say,
like social media feeds made us more scrupulous about the
sources of information or less scrupulous I don't know, or
maybe it's had a you know, divergent effect on different people. Well,
(26:19):
I think you have. You you do have sort of
two different timelines going on there, because I feel like,
on one hand, you have the industry responding. You have
like Facebook, for instance, responding to criticisms and an overall
need for better sourcing and uh an attribution of of
publication sources. And then also I think every individual is
(26:40):
probably going through this this situation where perhaps they're more
trusting and then they realize, oh, I really need to
be better about seeing where I'm getting my information and
then have it to self correct. Now there's another paper
that gets into some of this here, and this UH
is a four forthcoming paper from the Journal of Experimental
Psychology General. Now we should just out with le Lester
(27:01):
a scare. This is a forthcoming paper, so take with
a grain of salt that it has not yet fully
passed all of the pre pre publication review procedures. But
it's a it's been put out there and people have
been talking about it. Yeah. Titled prior exposure increases perceived
accuracy of fake news and and key here and all
this is quote fluency via prior exposure. They say that
(27:22):
even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy. Quote Moreover,
this illusory truth effect for fake news headlines occurs despite
a low level of overall believability, and even when the
stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers or are
inconsistent with the reader's political ideology. Also key here, that
(27:44):
is the extreme implausibility that we've been discussing. You know,
this boundary condition over the illusory truth effect. Um only
a small degree of potential plausibility is sufficient for repetition
to increase perceived accuracy. How small, Well imagine it is
going to vary from individual to individual. Right, we come
back to this. You mentioned earlier that then my my
(28:05):
boundary condition is not gonna be the same as yours. Yeah, Yeah,
that's a weird thing to wonder about. So, like you
might say that, for one person, if you showed them
a headline about bat Boy, they would not that wouldn't
even register as possibly true to begin with, So they're
never gonna believe it's more likely to be true later,
(28:25):
but somebody else might. But a lot of those other
types of headlines, just like weird, you know, kind of
nasty rumors about celebrities or politicians, A lot of those
that are slightly more plausible than say, bat Boy, are
probably gonna stick in a lot of people's minds. I
think about the way that news feed algorithms keep popular
stories in front of your eyes on social media. If
(28:48):
you keep coming back and scrolling, the most popular fake
news stories do tend to show up again and again
and again. Yeah, and then hopefully people are shooting it
down again. But but even then it's gonna have matter.
It's going to have a limited effect based on this
particular study here. Yeah, so it's worth remembering that these
effects are small, but small effects can add up quick example,
(29:10):
one of these fake headlines that they looked at here
was it was this ridiculous story and totally untrue Originally
five percent believed it was true. The second time people
saw it, ten percent believed it was true. So that
might sound small, but aggregated over whole populations with lots
of manipulative false stories and lies, this kind of thing
could have huge effects. It could swing an election in
(29:32):
a country. It could tip public opinion on an issue
from a minority opinion to a majority opinion. It could
have real effects in the world. Yeah, you're gonna have
more than one of these going on at a given time.
Some of them are gonna catch on, some of them
are not. But uh, adding them all together and they
could have an effect. So I think maybe we should
transition to talk about what we should do, both as
(29:54):
receivers of information trying to figure out what's true and
as purveyors of information who you know how public conversations.
What should we do in order to try to avoid
creating wide widespread misbeliefs in knowing what we know? Now, well,
let's receive an advertisement and then come right back with
(30:16):
an answer to that question. Okay, thank you, thank you,
all right, we're back. So one of the first questions
I think we should ask is what can you do
about this if you So say you've listened to these
past couple episodes and you're like, wow, So I I
accept that I'm susceptible to the illusory truth effect. I
know that being exposed to an untrue statement, or hearing
(30:37):
an untrue statement repeated, is going to probably make me
more likely to believe it. How can I protect myself
against it? Especially given that we've seen all these studies
showing that various things apparently don't protect you or don't
necessarily protect you. Knowing otherwise isn't even necessarily going to
protect you. And I've I've felt that before, Robert, I
(30:57):
don't know about you, Like there are cases where I'm
confident that I actually know what's true. I've done the research,
I know what reality is, and yet seeing a lie
that's that exists in contradiction to what I know, over
and over and over again actually does work on me.
I can feel it working on me. I can feel
(31:19):
doubt setting in. When I see a lie repeated with
great frequency, I start to wonder, like, is it true?
I mean, I've checked it out before and there's nothing
to it. But maybe I don't I miss something, Maybe
the maybe there's some new information I'm not pretty too. Yeah,
so I really do feel it working on me, even
though you know I'm somewhat aware of this, and so
(31:40):
it can be difficult. It can be hard to know
what to do to protect yourself. But here's one thing
I want to offer as a as a general rule.
A huge red flag for judging a statements truth or
falsehood is I feel like I've heard that somewhere before,
And I do this. I'm you know, I I fall
prey to this. I do it all the time. Actually,
(32:00):
in a conversation, I think something's true because I have
exactly that feeling. I feel like I've heard this somewhere before.
I would say, if it feels familiar, but you can't
recall why it's true, and you can't recall the source
of where you heard it, you are in the danger zone.
That is the red That is the red zone for
(32:21):
repeating and reinforcing a false belief. So I think maybe
we should try a little experiment. Let's do it. Let's
repeat something a bunch of times and see if it
sets in. So here's the phrase, if it feels familiar,
check the facts. If it feels familiar, check the facts.
If it feels familiar, check the facts. If it feels familiar,
(32:42):
check the facts. It feels familiar, check the facts. Death
to video Dromes, Long Live the New Flesh. All right,
well we've we've we've done it, job, Joe, I think
we've we've won. Now we haven't one yet. There's actually
there's some more stuff we've got to talk about. Uh So.
One of the other studies we looked at was just
study in political communication in twos sixteen by Emily Thorson
(33:03):
called belief echoes the persistent effects of corrected misinformation, And
this was a study where they did three experiments. Thorsen
writes that they showed that exposure to negative political information
persists even after people are informed that the information was
not true. So this goes along with some of the
fake news stuff we were just talking about. And Thorson
(33:25):
calls these beliefs that persist after being discredited quote belief echoes.
So she writes, quote belief echoes occur even when the
misinformation is corrected immediately. The gold standard of journalistic fact
checking the existence of belief echoes racist ethical concerns about
journalists and fact checking organization's efforts to publicly correct false
(33:47):
claims so dang. So even correcting a lie tends to
increase people's belief in the lie. What can you do then,
I know, I mean in this on top of the
reality that in some cases, corrections are not going to
resonate as as as much as the original, uh lie
(34:08):
or the original bit of unfactual information. Well, yeah, very
often a lie is interesting in the correction is not
interesting the corrections page two, but the the original. That's
the headline on page one. Yeah. So there was a
article in the Columbia Journalism Review by the Dartmouth political
scientists Brendan Nihan. It was called building a Better Correction. Now,
(34:29):
this is not necessarily responding to the exact same research
we've been talking about, but it addresses the fact that
journalistic fact checking, corrections and so forth can be insufficiently
effective at correcting false beliefs, and it does end up
coming up with a few recommendations based on Nihand's research
and other people's research in recent years. Number one is,
(34:52):
of course, identify sources that speak against their ideological interests.
So apparently people are more likely to accept a correction
on a false belief for a widely repeated lie if
that correction comes from somebody who who it's against their
political interests to to discredit it. Does that make sense?
So in the political sphere, if it is a misconception
(35:14):
that's widely held on the right, you need to get
somebody from the right to discredit it. If it's widely
held on the left, you need to get somebody from
the left to discredit it. Right. So like if if
the correction is pandas are not the most awesome animal
on the planet, it's going to carry more weight if
Panda weekly runs that correction as opposed to you know,
(35:34):
Grizzly Bears monthly exactly correct. So the second point coming
from the research is don't just assert that a false
claim is false given alternative causal account, So you give
a different explanation to read a quote from the article
quote in the fictitious scenario used in one study, For example,
respondents who were told of the presence of volatile materials
(35:58):
at the scene of a suspicious fire continued to blame
the materials even after being told the initial report was mistaken.
So you tell them there's volatile materials there, there was
a fire, what caused the fire? Oh, those volatile materials
weren't actually there. People say, oh, it was caused by
the volatile materials. So the only way to persuade people
(36:19):
against that seemed to be to give them another explanation
of what caused the fire. So you don't say, no,
those materials weren't actually there. You say they weren't there
and the fire was caused by arson if that's true. Obviously,
like you wouldn't want to make up fake alternative accounts,
but like, this is how you correct a misperception with
the truth. Is you give them the alternative causal account
(36:42):
that is true. And then finally, this is a big one,
don't state the correction is the negation of the lie.
Instead state the true fact that stands in contradiction of
the lie. Yeah, if you're having to say I am
not a cruk, you're kind of saying I have a cruk.
Instead you say I am a good person. Yeah, if
that's true. I mean the good people don't usually say
(37:02):
I'm a good person. Yeah. So, but an example would
be from the thing we used at the beginning of
the last episode about this widespread belief that crime has
gone up in the United States since two thousand eight.
That's not true. At all. Crime has gone down. So
you shouldn't say it's not true that crime has gone up,
because a lot of times people are just gonna remember
(37:23):
crime has gone up. Instead, what you should say and
that we've been violating this all this time. Here, what
you should say is crime has gone down since two
thousand eight. State the true fact, don't negate the lie,
and we have something we can chant to make this
really take hold in everybody's mind. I don't know. I
don't want to make you uncomfortable. You want to chance.
Let Okay, So here's here's the way i'd put it.
(37:44):
You won't kill a lie by repeating it. Instead, say
what's true. You won't kill a lie by repeating it? Instead,
say what's true. You won't kill a lie by repeating it. Instead,
say what's true? Death to video Drone. No, you won't
kill a lie by repeating it. Instead, say what's true.
If I feel like if we could have made it rhyme,
we would have helped. Oh maybe too light. It does
(38:07):
feel kind of creepy to chance, And that gets into
a thing that I did want to talk about at
the end here. That's frustrating because I wonder if there
is sometimes a sort of perverse system widely spreading bad beliefs,
essentially because people who are willing to lie and spread
malicious misinformation are also more willing to blatantly use proven
(38:28):
manipulation techniques like repetition and chanting and illusory truth, while
I feel like more often people who want to spread
the truth and want to spread true messages are more
hesitant to use blatantly manipulative types of rhetoric and communication.
I mean, I don't want to say like I'm so good,
but like I don't want to give people misinformation. But
also in trying to help them with that stuff, I
(38:50):
was just saying, like I felt very uncomfortable, like chanting
a phrase over and over again, even though I knew
it would be effective, right. I mean, generally speaking, if
individuals are are very serious about journalism, they're going to
want to adhere to the standards of their industry and
maybe not you know, fall back on you know, tribal
chance about about something because they feel they feel so
(39:14):
obviously manipulative, and they feel that way because they work.
I mean, this is kind of like a whole this
is a whole other area discussion, but you know, I
can't help but think in terms of the click bait
and the ease of publication and distribution. I mean, naturally,
this isn't something that's going to apply to individuals who,
via celebrity and or political power, already reach a wide audience.
(39:36):
But you know, any wild conspiracy theory or accusation can
can penetrate a lot deeper, seemingly these days than in
pre internet days. And we talked earlier about some of
the celebrity urban myths from decades past and about how
to really get going. They had to you had to
have just the right celebrity um urban legend, and it
had to had to spread by word of mouth or
(39:59):
maybe a you know, a concentrated effort to send facts
is across Hollywood potentially. I don't even know if that's
true in the Richard Gear case, but that might be
a repeated false story exactly. Yeah, that's that's one of
those situations where I think that correct me if I'm wrong,
but out there. But I don't think anyone's ever really
been able to get to the bottom of like where
(40:21):
the urban legend even really emerged from UM. But yeah, nowadays,
like the ease of publication is a lot lower and
we're we're having we're currently in a time where we
seem to be correcting and figuring out, well, how do
we manage this just plethora of of of publications of
varying uh, you know, you know, ethical solidity. But that's
(40:46):
just one part of the issue obviously. Well, it's a
really difficult time. Yeah, our media landscape is is difficult.
I don't know what to what to do, Like, what
the best way to address the wide spread of misinformation
through social media and the internet is. I mean, you can't, like,
you know, you don't want to become a sensor and
lock it down and say, well I will decide what's
(41:07):
true and false. I'll shut you down. You'd want there
to be an organic way where people would would I
don't know, have the tools to tell between truth and
falsehood themselves. Yeah, you know. And then one of the
issues too for us is that we we sometimes discuss
theories and hypotheses that that are not true or I've
been disproven over time that this is exactly something I
(41:30):
wanted to talk about at the end of the episode today,
it's a very frustrating takeaway from this conversation we've had,
Um that there could be negative effects from discussing what's
wrong with bad ideas and false claims because something we
love to do, we love to do on this show.
For example, we just did an episode about the ancient
aliens hypothesis, something that I don't want to speak for
(41:51):
both of us. I think neither of us think there's
any good evidence to believe is true. I do not
believe there is, so we we put no stock whatsoever
in this hypo. Theis it's the belief that ancient aliens
came to the Earth. All of the evidence is either
really bad over interpretation or outright fraud. And yet it's
fascinating to understand this widely held, unfounded belief, to understand
(42:12):
where it came from, why people believe it, To talk
about the real facts and the real knowledge that undermine
the existing claims in this belief structure, uh, to think
about what good evidence there could be for past alien contact,
if there, if it did exist. Yeah, it's it's kind
of like trying to imagine how a dragon would work
based on real world biology. Yeah, you know, like you
(42:32):
don't want to advocate that dragons are real, but it
is fun to to take it apart and say, well,
if they were real, this is how it would work,
and your discussion of that should be based on real biology,
and so all this stuff. This is all stuff that
I really enjoy and I think is very valuable. But
it makes me wonder if even by having that kind
of discussion, some people are more likely to, you know,
(42:55):
months years down the road later, remember as true the
claims that we zamin in order to criticize and understand
where they come from in the episode. I don't know
if there's any way around that. Like, I don't think
it's reasonable to say we should live in a world
where nobody ever examines or talks about why widely held
untrue beliefs. That that just doesn't seem reasonable. I think
(43:17):
we learn almost as much about the world and about
ourselves from critically studying the false misbeliefs we hold as
we do from say, reading a list of objectively true
statements about the world. It's not like studying false beliefs
is uninformative. It's very informative. Yeah, And in some cases
it's it's about not not repeating history, right, not being
doomed to repeat history. Um, when we when we've talked
(43:40):
about eugenics, for instance, on the show, Uh, you know
that there's some horrible ideas wrapped up in eugenics, but
it is it is worth remembering. It's it's it's worth
knowing how we got there. Yeah, we we had that
discussion with Karl Zimmer a while back, because that talked
about that, and that's an important part of the history
of the study of inheritance. If you just ignore it
and say we never will talk about that anymore, um,
(44:03):
you you do a disservice to, like, you know, the
memory of all the evil that was done in its name.
And yeah, you like you're saying, you open yourself to
not being aware of the really bad paths people can
go down. Now. Now, of course, obviously ancient aliens is
less high stakes than that. But but still I think
the same as some of the same principles apply. And
then then again at the same time, I like, I
(44:23):
don't want to deny this research. I acknowledge it seems
very true that bringing up a statement, even to discredit
the statement or even to criticize the statement, can have
the negative side effect of many people increasing their belief
in that statement later on, just because it sticks somewhere
in the back of their mind. They don't remember the
original context in which it came up, which was a
(44:46):
context of criticism or context of debunking, and so people
just kind of they think, oh, maybe there is something
to that. I've heard that somewhere before. It feels kind
of familiar. Yeah, well, and I guess one of one
argument one could make then would be, Hey, if you're
going to cover ancient aliens, then you also have to
make sure that you cover an ancient in an ancient
aliens free way, like how life actually emerges on Earth,
(45:10):
which we certainly discussed evolution on the show before. So
I think we're we're mostly there. Well, I'm not worrying
that we have a deficiency of saying true things, but
I wonder what we can do about the fact that
these types of discussions of bad ideas that are really
important and interesting to have can also have these negative
(45:31):
side effects. I don't think I know quite what the
answer is yet. Obviously it will depend a lot on
the context of the idea. Oh yes, certainly, and then
this would actually be a great a great topic to
hear back from listeners on. Really, yeah, help me out
of this dilemma. I feel stuck. I don't think I
can live in a world where false beliefs and bad
(45:53):
ideas can never be spoken of. That would sort of,
It would rob intellectual life of so much of its richness,
you know, ven us from gaining all these insights about
our culture and our minds. At the same time, I
don't want to spread bad beliefs. I don't know what
to do about that. Well, remain remains an open question
for now. Then and in the meantime, If you want
(46:13):
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where you will find them,
as well as links out to our various social media accounts.
And if you want to help the show, you want
to support the show, rate and review us wherever you
have the ability to do so. Huge thanks as always
to our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams and Torry Harrison.
If you would like to get in touch with us
(46:33):
directly to to get me out of my dilemma from
this episode, or to suggest a topic for a future episode,
to give feedback on this episode or any other, just
to say hi, let us know where you listen from.
You can email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
(46:59):
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. The
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