How liars create the 'illusion of truth'

[LessAspin]

This is 4 years old but more relevant than ever...

Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda, says psychologist Tom Stafford.

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Among psychologists something like this known as the "illusion of truth" effect. Here's how a typical experiment on the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like "A prune is a dried plum". Sometimes these items are true (like that one), but sometimes participants see a parallel version which isn't true ( something like "A date is a dried plum" ).

After a break – of minutes or even weeks – the participants do the procedure again, but this time some of the items they rate are new, and some they saw before in the first phase. The key finding is that people tend to rate items they've seen before as more likely to be true, regardless of whether they are true or not, and seemingly for the sole reason that they are more familiar.

So, here, captured in the lab, seems to be the source for the saying that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. And if you look around yourself, you may start to think that everyone from advertisers to politicians are taking advantage of this foible of human psychology.

But a reliable effect in the lab isn't necessarily an important effect on people's real-world beliefs. If you really could make a lie sound true by repetition, there'd be no need for all the other techniques of persuasion...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161026-how-liars-create-the-illusion-of-truth

Link to tweet

President Kennedy's quote on the Republican Party.................................

[Shermann]

1. Also known as the Proof by Repeated Assertion nt

[ck4829]

2. That little dipstick who said "Facts don't care about your feelings" never considered that...

Feelings decide what everyone, left and right, decides what those facts are. What facts are worth caring about.

Reality is not decided by experiments, logic, or reason. It's decided by utilizing the constructs that often confirm what you already believe and a desire to go with the person who yells the loudest and can shout over the other person.

[Igel]

3. Get in first, repeat often, and don't let alternative ideas get presented.

Bubble and echo chamber.

Sentences with negation are also bad for liars.

"I am not a crook" requires two steps in processing (according to measurement of brain activity).

The first is pretty clearly you have to understand and accept as a working model "I am a crook." For a moment, that is the truth you assume.

The second step is you have to then negate it, to "Not 'I am a crook'."

Most do that just fine, even if they can't handle the complexities of "If it's cloudy, there won't be a picnic" and meet that with the assertion, "What? It's such a bright, sunny day, why are you saying the picnic's been canceled?"

What everybody does--some more often, some less often, but everybody at some point--is misremember. Because when you recall that from memory, you still have the two-step process. If you forget the first bit, you don't remember it at all. But if you remember the first step you can still forget the second step, in which case you remember the utterance as "I am a crook."

So denying wrongdoing is much inferior to saying that others commit wrongdoing. Even if you backtrack when they say, "We didn't do that" the damage is done. (And some will say "great". You can't help ethical lapses.)