[tt] [silk] Trying to debunk myths tends to backfire

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Udhay Shankar N <udhay at pobox.com> -----

From: Udhay Shankar N <udhay at pobox.com>
Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 23:15:12 +0530
To: silklist at lists.hserus.net
Subject: [silk] Trying to debunk myths tends to backfire
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933_pf.html

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 4, 2007; A03

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently 
issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited 
various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or 
"false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The 
side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu 
vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had 
volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 
minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false 
statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of 
the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as 
many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was 
that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false 
beliefs was the respected CDC.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been 
confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have 
broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to 
myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate 
information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and 
clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically 
contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans 
incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 
planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the 
Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose 
because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to 
connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence 
reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help 
keep it alive.

Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction 
of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab 
terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working 
there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon 
was struck by a missile rather than a plane.

Those notions remain widespread even though the federal government 
now runs Web sites in seven languages to challenge them. Karen 
Hughes, who runs the Bush administration's campaign to win hearts and 
minds in the fight against terrorism, recently painted a glowing 
report of the "digital outreach" teams working to counter 
misinformation and myths by challenging those ideas on Arabic blogs.

A report last year by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, however, 
found that the number of Muslims worldwide who do not believe that 
Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks is soaring -- to 59 percent of 
Turks and Egyptians, 65 percent of Indonesians, 53 percent of 
Jordanians, 41 percent of Pakistanis and even 56 percent of British Muslims.

Research on the difficulty of debunking myths has not been 
specifically tested on beliefs about Sept. 11 conspiracies or the 
Iraq war. But because the experiments illuminate basic properties of 
the human mind, psychologists such as Schwarz say the same phenomenon 
is probably implicated in the spread and persistence of a variety of 
political and social myths.

The research does not absolve those who are responsible for promoting 
myths in the first place. What the psychological studies highlight, 
however, is the potential paradox in trying to fight bad information 
with good information.

Schwarz's study was published this year in the journal Advances in 
Experimental Social Psychology, but the roots of the research go back 
decades. As early as 1945, psychologists Floyd Allport and Milton 
Lepkin found that the more often people heard false wartime rumors, 
the more likely they were to believe them.

The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind 
works. Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb 
information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain 
uses subconscious "rules of thumb" that can bias it into thinking 
that false information is true. Clever manipulators can take 
advantage of this tendency.

The experiments also highlight the difference between asking people 
whether they still believe a falsehood immediately after giving them 
the correct information, and asking them a few days later. Long-term 
memories matter most in public health campaigns or political ones, 
and they are the most susceptible to the bias of thinking that 
well-recalled false information is true.

The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if 
that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind's bias 
does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the 
myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally 
interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed 
to firmly grasp the facts.

The research also highlights the disturbing reality that once an idea 
has been implanted in people's minds, it can be difficult to 
dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, 
which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it.

Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are 
repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the 
brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

Many easily remembered things, in fact, such as one's birthday or a 
pet's name, are indeed true. But someone trying to manipulate public 
opinion can take advantage of this aspect of brain functioning. In 
politics and elsewhere, this means that whoever makes the first 
assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone who 
denies it later.

Furthermore, a new experiment by Kimberlee Weaver at Virginia 
Polytechnic Institute and others shows that hearing the same thing 
over and over again from one source can have the same effect as 
hearing that thing from many different people -- the brain gets 
tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from 
multiple, independent sources, even when it has not. Weaver's study 
was published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The experiments by Weaver, Schwarz and others illustrate another 
basic property of the mind -- it is not good at remembering when and 
where a person first learned something. People are not good at 
keeping track of which information came from credible sources and 
which came from less trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some 
information came from the same untrustworthy source over and over 
again. Even if a person recognizes which sources are credible and 
which are not, repeated assertions and denials can have the effect of 
making the information more accessible in memory and thereby making 
it feel true, said Schwarz.

Experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew 
University in Jerusalem, also found that for a substantial chunk of 
people, the "negation tag" of a denial falls off with time. Mayo's 
findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social 
Psychology in 2004.

"If someone says, 'I did not harass her,' I associate the idea of 
harassment with this person," said Mayo, explaining why people who 
are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their 
reputations remain tarnished. "Even if he is innocent, this is what 
is activated when I hear this person's name again.

"If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what 
comes in your mind," she added. "Even if you say it is not true, you 
will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11."

Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make 
a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original 
myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did 
during a marathon congressional debate, that "Saddam Hussein did not 
attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did," Mayo said it would be 
better to say something like, "Osama bin Laden was the only person 
responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks" -- and not mention Hussein at all.

The psychologist acknowledged that such a statement might not be 
entirely accurate -- issuing a denial or keeping silent are sometimes 
the only real options.

So is silence the best way to deal with myths? Unfortunately, the 
answer to that question also seems to be no.

Another recent study found that when accusations or assertions are 
met with silence, they are more likely to feel true, said Peter Kim, 
an organizational psychologist at the University of Southern 
California. He published his study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Myth-busters, in other words, have the odds against them.


-- 
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))


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