Why False Information Stays Stuck in Our Brains

[Celerity]

And why we need to focus on how people think.

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/62071e1adc551a0020867247/trust-the-science/



There is a tweet from Mike Caulfield, a researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, that I’ve been thinking about. “The biggest info lesson for me re: COVID is that first information is just *ridiculously* sticky,” he wrote. “And I say this as someone who didn't realize you can put modern alkaline batteries in the trash until three weeks ago.”

Link to tweet

What Caulfield is saying is that, for many, the information presented when we’re first introduced to a new subject or fact is hard to shake, even if we later find out it is wrong or in need of a revision. Anecdotally, I feel like I see this all the time in my life with regard to COVID responses and procedures. We know COVID is an airborne virus with low risk of surface or object transmission and yet stores, restaurants, and public places still engage in the hygiene theater of sanitizing tables and pens while ignoring more proven, substantial virus-mitigation efforts like, say, upgrading air-filtration systems. Two years into a pandemic, there are still a nontrivial amount of people under the mistaken impression that if they wash their hands and stand six feet apart indoors they are mostly protected from the virus. Others still doubt the efficacy of masks or—I’ve encountered this one a lot—believe that masks don’t need to cover the nose.

Link to tweet

Granted, plenty of COVID ignorance and misinformation is ideologically motivated or borne from a genuine misunderstanding of how viruses work. But some of it might also be the result of this sticky-information problem, which is known in psychology circles as the “continued influence effect.” A recent paper in Nature described it this way:



I called up Maddy Jalbert, a postdoctoral scholar and Caulfield’s colleague at the University of Washington, to ask her about this. Jalbert studies how context and our daily experiences can shape our memory and also our decision-making abilities. “When you give humans a piece of information, we are very good at connecting it to things we already know,” she told me. “But if you retract that piece of information and people have already made these connections, you can’t go back and magically take that information out of a person’s head because then that whole understanding of the information they’ve connected it to is different. So people will then rely on their original understanding of things they’ve incorporated.”

snip

[Walleye]

1. They think that the virus is too small to be stopped by a man

They can’t get it into their heads that the virus is carried on little the water droplets which can be stopped by a mask. I don’t know how much this is deliberate. Complaining they are “confused”, still sounds political

[TheBlackAdder]

2. That's partly why FOX News is successful corrupting minds. They say crap and never retract it.

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With all of that crap, their viewers become even bigger shitheads.

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