[Reader-list] Lists and assaults

[Dinesh, Servelots]

Interestingly, I saw this on another list today.
Maybe this will provide a perspective on why some are silent :)

d

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933_pf.html

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 4, 2007; A03

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.