Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach
By
Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
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.
A
doggy daycare owner and groomer is being accused of severely beating a
customer’s dog.
