"The Science of Truthiness"

[applegrove]

The Science of Truthiness

By Katy Waldman at Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/09/truthiness_research_cognitive_biases_for_simple_clear_conservative_messages.html

"SNIP..........................

Truthiness is the word Stephen Colbert coined to describe the intuitive, not always rational feeling we get that something is just right. Are mopeds dangerous? Sure, if by dangerous you mean significantly riskier than cars but slightly less direful than motorcycles. They are not dangerous compared to smoking a lot of cigarettes or owning a gun. The point is that, while nothing about the bumper sticker backed up its ominous claim, I automatically accepted it.

Truthiness is “truth that comes from the gut, not books,” Colbert said in 2005. The word became a lexical prize jewel for Frank Rich, who alluded to it in multiple columns, including one in which he accused John McCain’s 2008 campaign of trying to “envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness.” Scientists who study the phenomenon now also use the term. It humorously captures how, as cognitive psychologist Eryn Newman put it, “smart, sophisticated people” can go awry on questions of fact.

...................


Newman, who works out of the University of California–Irvine, recently uncovered an unsettling precondition for truthiness: The less effort it takes to process a factual claim, the more accurate it seems. When we fluidly and frictionlessly absorb a piece of information, one that perhaps snaps neatly onto our existing belief structures, we are filled with a sense of comfort, familiarity, and trust. The information strikes us as credible, and we are more likely to affirm it—whether or not we should.


How do our brains decide which assertions seem most lucid and credible? One way to ease cognitive processing is to hoop an idea with relevant details. This is similar to what happens with priming: Barrage people with words like leash, collar, tail, and paw and then ask them for a word that rhymes with smog. They’re much likelier to fetch the word dog than, say, bog or agog, because the neural nebula containing Fido is already active. In one experiment, people who read the sentence “The stormy seas tossed the boat” were more prone than those who read the sentence “He saved up his money and bought a boat” to report they’d come across the word boat in a previous exercise, whether they really had or not. The “semantically predictive” statement, salted with seafaring concepts like storm, allowed readers to anticipate the kicker: boat. Then, when the boat appeared, they processed the word so fluently they assumed they must have encountered it previously—the low cognitive effort created an illusion of familiarity.


...........................SNIP"