With political “discussions” frequently coming to
an impasse in many democratic chambers and with the US warming up for a year of
electioneering, it is important to listen carefully to the arguments put
forward. The spin-doctors are often being outshone by the fictions that have
become firmly fixed in the minds of most of us.
How is it that we become attached to these fictions
even after we have seen/read evidence to the contrary? Green and Donahue of U
of North Carolina set out to look at this in some detail (1). They started from the knowledge that a
journalist who writes a story that is later proved to be untrue suffers damage
to their reputation, but do the untruths hang on once they have had life
breathed into them?
A group of 160 lab rats were fed a story and some
were told at the outset that it was fictional, some others were told after they
had read it that there had been an unintentional error, while some others were
told that they were intentionally deceived. In all cases they were unhappy with
the author and endeavored to correct the untruths by marking up the text.
This sounds good, but they weren’t very good at
getting rid of the inaccuracies. The fact that they had gained a low opinion of the author
didn’t mean that they rejected the whole thing. The “mud sticks” attitude
appears to be live and well.
Once an idea has been planted, it will keep growing
it seems, even when we know it to be incorrect. Perhaps it is the doubt that was
cast that survives in the face of the real facts. It would be interesting to
find out at which stage of the informing process that the attitudes become
fixed.
I wonder that if the error were immediately pointed
out so we won’t have processed the information and made it our own, the attitude
wouldn’t have had time to become established. Perhaps, the longer that it has been lurking
round our neurons, the more difficult it is clean out completely.
We will all need to work on or skepticism and not
let our guard down.
- M.C.Green and J.K.Donahue, Media Psychology, 14, 312, (2011).
