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How Lies Spread

Sam Wang and Sandra Ammod, writing at the New York Times, have a very interesting observation about declarative sentences which are false, commonly known as lies.

They claim that

"The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer's hard drive does.

Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man's curled pinkie finger.

But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed.

In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned.

For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don't remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true.

Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true."

This is pretty interesting. It strikes me as a reasonable. Perhaps it is related to the phenomena of not being able to say: don't think of an elephant. Of what you say, an elephant. Ok, oops I am thinking about it.

Combined with social proof, risk avoidance and authority, it is not so hard to understand why the big lie is so effective.

How can we combat this?

The authors suggest that the experiments show "it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true."

So we should think that lies don't spread easily?

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Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on July 18, 2008 (boomark / email).