Speaker 1: My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. In. Today, we're gonna be talking about one
Speaker 1: of our favorite subjects, our tendency to believe things that
Speaker 1: aren't true. Uh. Now, Robert, I wonder is there a
Speaker 1: false factoid or claim that you just always find yourself
Speaker 1: recalling as true even though you've checked it before and
Speaker 1: discovered it to be false in the past. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is an interesting question because I feel like there are
Speaker 1: things that come up in research all the time, certainly
Speaker 1: key things over the years. Uh. You know, as we
Speaker 1: research and riot different topics where I have to correct on,
Speaker 1: you know, where I think I knew something and then
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, well that's that's actually now that actually
Speaker 1: do the research, it's not not a not a fact.
Speaker 1: And then then you know, the same goes for false beliefs,
Speaker 1: that beliefs that they creep in the sort of Mandela
Speaker 1: fact type of scenario. For instance, there was a time
Speaker 1: when I thought Gene Wilder was dead prior to his
Speaker 1: actual death, and then as he actually dead, now he
Speaker 1: was actually dead now. So I thought he was dead
Speaker 1: before he was dead exactly because and I think it
Speaker 1: was just a combination of he was not as active anymore,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't really keeping up with the Gene Wilder
Speaker 1: filmography and like current events related to Gene Wilder and
Speaker 1: something maybe I picked up on some news piece at
Speaker 1: some point and somehow he got clicked to the dead category.
Speaker 1: And then when I found out he was alive, it
Speaker 1: was it was really like he came back to life.
Speaker 1: And I had the same thing happened literally just the
Speaker 1: other day with a standout comedian, Larry Miller. I don't
Speaker 1: think I remember who that is. Oh. He he had
Speaker 1: to kind of you know, dry observational comedy. He he
Speaker 1: had a I think he still acts, but he would
Speaker 1: show up on say night chord. I think, oh wait
Speaker 1: a minute of seeing some Christopher Guest movies. He may
Speaker 1: have been. Yeah, But for some reason years ago, I
Speaker 1: got into my had that he had passed away, And
Speaker 1: so occasionally I would think of Larry Miller and be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember Larry Miller. Too bad he passed. And then
Speaker 1: I actually looked him up the other day and it
Speaker 1: turns out he has not passed away. He's still very
Speaker 1: much alive and active, and I was just living in
Speaker 1: this fantasy world of dead Larry Miller's. You know, I
Speaker 1: have false beliefs that recur with much more significance, Like
Speaker 1: I keep remembering that. Yeah, maybe it's just because I
Speaker 1: was told this all the time when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: that vitamin C supplements will ward off colds. That is
Speaker 1: not experimentally proven, that that is like not a finding
Speaker 1: of science. And yet I just always if I haven't
Speaker 1: checked in a while, it just seeps right back in, like, yes,
Speaker 1: that is true, vitamin C it'll keep colds away. Well,
Speaker 1: it's easy to fall into the trap. I do this
Speaker 1: all the time with with various vitamins and some supplements
Speaker 1: where I'm like, I don't know if it works, probably
Speaker 1: doesn't work, but I'm gonna go and take it just
Speaker 1: in case, because it's it's vitamin C. You know, what's
Speaker 1: the what's what's the harm there? It's kind of like
Speaker 1: believing in God's in cases that he exists. Believing in vitamins. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then you end up with like a weird sort
Speaker 1: of vitamin tentnacle going out of your neck and you
Speaker 1: didn't see that coming. That's fake news. The Joe Vitamin
Speaker 1: C will not cause a tentacle to grow out of
Speaker 1: your neck. But now you've heard it, it's true. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I feel like there are things that have
Speaker 1: popped up where where I'll think, well, I've always heard X,
Speaker 1: but I've never actually looked it up. Um. And and
Speaker 1: then that's where the problem seeps in, you know, where
Speaker 1: I just I think I know something, but I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: but I don't care enough to actually investigate. Um. There
Speaker 1: is one possible example that that comes up, and that
Speaker 1: is there was this, of course, the idea that George
Speaker 1: Washington Carver invented peanut better. He did know he had
Speaker 1: something to do with peanuts. He had, so yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: He was. He is a famous inventor, important to African
Speaker 1: American inventor. And I just I didn't know a lot
Speaker 1: about him, and I had always heard the peanut better thing,
Speaker 1: but I didn't actually research until I helped my son
Speaker 1: with a class project about him earlier this year, and
Speaker 1: then I was able to definitely, you know, check that
Speaker 1: one off on the mental list, like, okay, this is
Speaker 1: this is this is false. He did not invent peanut butter.
Speaker 1: He did, but he did do stuff with peanuts, do
Speaker 1: stuff with peanuts, but not peanut butter. Okay. You know.
Speaker 1: A huge place where you can see false beliefs persisting
Speaker 1: um is in people's beliefs about sort of like political
Speaker 1: facts or sociological data. A very very common one is
Speaker 1: people's beliefs about crime. I think it's because like crime
Speaker 1: is one of those like sensational types of subjects and
Speaker 1: makes people think about violence, images of blood they see
Speaker 1: on the news and stuff like that. In a poll
Speaker 1: conducted by Pew in the fall of get this, fifty
Speaker 1: seven percent, so a majority of people who had voted
Speaker 1: or planned to vote in ten said that crime had
Speaker 1: gotten worse in the United States since two thousand eight
Speaker 1: by every objective measure. Exactly. The opposite is true. That's
Speaker 1: just not true. FBI statistics based off of like nationwide
Speaker 1: police reports UH found that violent crime and property crime
Speaker 1: in the United States fell nineteen percent and twenty three percent, respectively,
Speaker 1: between two thousand and eight. And and so you think, okay, well,
Speaker 1: maybe that if that's just police reports, maybe fewer people
Speaker 1: are reporting crimes to the police, right, But also the
Speaker 1: U S Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics does
Speaker 1: direct annual surveys of more than ninety thousand households to
Speaker 1: see about rates of crime that might not be reported
Speaker 1: to police, and quote the b j S state to
Speaker 1: show that violent crime and property crime rates fell twenty
Speaker 1: six percent and twenty two percent, respectively between two thousand eight.
Speaker 1: And so a majority of people are believing something that
Speaker 1: by every measure we know, is not true. Crime has
Speaker 1: gone down, and yet a majority of people believe it
Speaker 1: has gone up. And it's not hard to see why
Speaker 1: that might be true when you consider like the political
Speaker 1: messaging of certain politicians. It's also you could also, of
Speaker 1: course think about just people negativity bias, right, the tendency
Speaker 1: to believe things are worse than they are in the
Speaker 1: broad sense or mean world syndrome looking at dangerous stuff
Speaker 1: happening on the news and thus having an overrepresentation of
Speaker 1: it in your mind. But I think we would be
Speaker 1: wrong to ignore the effects of hearing specific politicians well,
Speaker 1: for for example, in twenty sixteen, specifically, it was Donald
Speaker 1: Trump a lot talking about how crime is through the roof, right,
Speaker 1: And to your point, we can look to statistics on this.
Speaker 1: This is not something that is uh, that is just
Speaker 1: you know, in the ether, we have hard data. It's
Speaker 1: not a matter of opinion. It's just like every measure
Speaker 1: we have says that's not correct. But what about other beliefs,
Speaker 1: I mean that that's certainly not in isolation. There are
Speaker 1: lots of cases where there are widespread beliefs in things
Speaker 1: that are just simply factually not true. Yeah. I'll run
Speaker 1: through a few here that that range on topic. For instance,
Speaker 1: here's a nice science related one to kick off with. UH.
Speaker 1: In a two thousand fifteen PU survey, only thirty percent
Speaker 1: of Americans knew that water boils at a lower temperature
Speaker 1: at higher altitudes. Thirty nine percent said it would boil
Speaker 1: at the same temperature in Denver in l A, again
Speaker 1: Denver being at a far higher altitude, and had it reversed.
Speaker 1: So the majority, something like two thirds of people were
Speaker 1: just flat wrong, yes and uh yeah. And to put
Speaker 1: that in perspective with another science fact, most Americans in
Speaker 1: this two thousand fifteen survey eight correctly identified the Earth's
Speaker 1: inner layer, the core, as its hottest part. And uh
Speaker 1: nearly as many two percent knew that uranium was needed
Speaker 1: to make nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Well, should we
Speaker 1: be comforted by the fact that that's what people know.
Speaker 1: I don't like, they don't know much about water, but
Speaker 1: they know about nuclear weapons. Well. I mean, on one hand,
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons is was is and was more in the news. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then on the other hand, like the the inside
Speaker 1: of the earth is more engaging and and also completely unpoliticized. Uh. Well, well,
Speaker 1: water is not politically boiling point of water is not politicized.
Speaker 1: But it's also not very sexy. I guess like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those things where unless you're actively
Speaker 1: moving from low to high altitudes, or you know, living
Speaker 1: part of your time and dinner from part of your
Speaker 1: time in l A, I guess it's it's very possible
Speaker 1: to live your entire life without really having any real
Speaker 1: world experience with the difference. Uh. Though, I do feel
Speaker 1: like if you read enough baking manuals, it comes up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but maybe you just don't remember which way it goes.
Speaker 1: I guess I say that you know one of the
Speaker 1: ones you've got here that that has come up many
Speaker 1: times in my life. It's come up enough that I
Speaker 1: know the right answer now. But the misconception that you
Speaker 1: can see the Great Wall of China from space. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: this is one that I have to admit. I think
Speaker 1: I used to adhere to again without really a rap
Speaker 1: princing it, because it just it had that kind of
Speaker 1: truthiness to it, right, and you want it to be
Speaker 1: to be real. The idea that that this this epic
Speaker 1: structure created uh you know long ago, is visible from space,
Speaker 1: but it's actually been been disproven multiple times. It's it's
Speaker 1: only visible from low orbit under very ideal conditions, and
Speaker 1: it's not visible from the moon at all. Because that's
Speaker 1: another version of it, that it's that that the Great
Speaker 1: Wall of China can be seen from the moon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess there are nuances to the word visible. What's
Speaker 1: that mean? But in the normal sense that you would
Speaker 1: mean it's not visible from space. Now a two thousand
Speaker 1: sixteen you gov poll, this was this is a UK group.
Speaker 1: They looked at how belief in Pizza Gate, that thing,
Speaker 1: how that shakes out across different voter groups. Now, that
Speaker 1: was this vast conspiracy theory people had about how there
Speaker 1: was a pizza restaurant in Washington, d C. That was
Speaker 1: like running child slavery ings that was linked to the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party. Yeah, it had to do with an idea
Speaker 1: that Clinton campaign emails supposedly talked about human trafficking and pedophilia.
Speaker 1: And according to this particular poll, seventeen percent of polled
Speaker 1: Clinton voters believed that that this was the case, this
Speaker 1: was a reality, and forty percent of Trump voters did. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there's another classic they looked out to to
Speaker 1: put this in perspective, the idea that President Barack Obama
Speaker 1: was born in Kenya. Kind Of alarmingly enough, across both
Speaker 1: groups of voters, both the Clinton voters and the Trump voters,
Speaker 1: they found thirty six percent believed it, despite the fact
Speaker 1: that that too, has been debunked time and time again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's crazy that these types of beliefs can
Speaker 1: catch on so well, especially like we we understand very
Speaker 1: well the way that political ideology and tribal thinking affects
Speaker 1: the way we form opinions. Obviously, our our opinions are
Speaker 1: deeply informed by what people we view as our in
Speaker 1: group believe, and so we want to be in line
Speaker 1: with the in group and and stuff like that. But
Speaker 1: you also can't really ignore the fact that these are
Speaker 1: things that if you pay attention to certain sources you're
Speaker 1: going to be hearing over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: and what effect that might have, Because it's, you know,
Speaker 1: widely accepted folk wisdom that if you repeat a lie enough,
Speaker 1: people start to believe that it's the truth. Right, That's
Speaker 1: one of the things. I mean, I don't know, you've
Speaker 1: said it enough times that I'm already convinced exactly, I
Speaker 1: mean almost going along with this. Uh. There's a quote
Speaker 1: that often gets sourced to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Gebbele's. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some versions of the quote say something like, if you
Speaker 1: repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and
Speaker 1: you will even come to believe it yourself. I couldn't
Speaker 1: find any evidence that just Gebbels actually said that. It
Speaker 1: seems to be a misattribution, but it's sort of a
Speaker 1: paraphrase of similar ideas that are you know, within that
Speaker 1: that frame of thinking. Like Adolf Hitler himself throat in
Speaker 1: mind comp quote, The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield
Speaker 1: no success unless one fundamental principle is born in mind
Speaker 1: constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to
Speaker 1: a few points and repeat them over and over here,
Speaker 1: as so often in the world, persistence is the first
Speaker 1: and most important requirement for success. So just the fact
Speaker 1: that Hitler said it obviously shouldn't make us think, well,
Speaker 1: you know, he's right. He was Hitler though. If if
Speaker 1: Hitler was good at anything, it was getting lots of
Speaker 1: people to believe lies. Certainly. So, I think because this
Speaker 1: is such an important issue, and because widespread misconceptions are
Speaker 1: so common, and because they can, in fact, especially in
Speaker 1: some political circumstances, be so destructive, and because the repetition
Speaker 1: of lies and false statements in in at every scale
Speaker 1: of existence, you know, in in mass media and in
Speaker 1: our personal private lives, is so common, I think it's
Speaker 1: worth looking at the actual empirical case. Is this true,
Speaker 1: the idea that repeeding statements over and over does that
Speaker 1: actually change what we believe. It's one of those things
Speaker 1: that you know, it sounds so common sensical you just
Speaker 1: assume it's true. But according to the logic we're using now,
Speaker 1: those are exactly the kinds of statements that maybe we
Speaker 1: should be careful about. Yeah, and I think this is
Speaker 1: an important important topic for for everybody. I don't care
Speaker 1: who you voted for in any previous elections, or which
Speaker 1: political party in your given system that you adhere to.
Speaker 1: I think if you're listening to this show especially, you
Speaker 1: want to think for yourself. You want to reduce the
Speaker 1: amount of manipulation that's going on with your your own
Speaker 1: view of reality and and and that's what we're going
Speaker 1: to discuss here today. We're gonna discuss the degree to
Speaker 1: which false information can manipulate our view of reality and ultimately,
Speaker 1: what are some of the things we can do to
Speaker 1: to hold onto our our our individuality and all of
Speaker 1: this exactly. So this is going to be the first
Speaker 1: of a two part episode where we explore the liar's
Speaker 1: best trick, the question of repetition and exposure in forming
Speaker 1: our beliefs and changing our attitudes. So that's going to
Speaker 1: be the jumping off point for today's episode. Does exposure
Speaker 1: and repetition Is hearing a claim and hearing it repeated
Speaker 1: actually have the power to change our beliefs or is
Speaker 1: that just unverified folk wisdom? Yeah? And and of course
Speaker 1: it goes it goes well beyond politics. It also gets
Speaker 1: into marketing. You know, we've we've touched on the manipulative
Speaker 1: nature of marketing and advertisement on the show before, And
Speaker 1: it's always one of the things you always come back to.
Speaker 1: It's always about messaging, right, like what is the message
Speaker 1: of the product, what's the message of the ad campaign?
Speaker 1: And how they just continue to hammer that home. Why
Speaker 1: do brands have slogans? Yeah? Why don't they just tell
Speaker 1: you a positive message about the brand that's different every time?
Speaker 1: Why do they tell you the same message in the
Speaker 1: same words in every commercial? Yeah? Why did those fabulous
Speaker 1: horror trailers from the nineteen seventies say the name of
Speaker 1: the film eighteen times, don't go in the basement, don't
Speaker 1: go in the basement? No one er seventeen will be admitted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all. It's all kind of part of the same situation.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're going to take a quick break
Speaker 1: and when we get back we will dive into the
Speaker 1: research in the history of psychology about repetition and exposure.
Speaker 1: Thank alright, we're back. So the first question we're going
Speaker 1: to be looking at today is whether anyone has actually
Speaker 1: studied this question, this question of whether exposing people to
Speaker 1: acclaim and then repeating the claim makes them believe it,
Speaker 1: Whether anybody studied that in a controlled scientific context. And
Speaker 1: the answer is a resounding yes. There are I think
Speaker 1: dozens of studies on this subject in various forms. Probably
Speaker 1: the flagship study on this, the first big one that
Speaker 1: everybody sites that that really got people into the subject,
Speaker 1: that got the ball rolling on it was from ninety
Speaker 1: seven and it was by Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and
Speaker 1: Thomas Topino, and it was called Frequency and the Conference
Speaker 1: of Referential Validity in the Journal of Verbal Learning and
Speaker 1: Verbal Behavior. And that was, as I said, in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven. So the authors started out in the study
Speaker 1: by talking about how most studies of memory that take
Speaker 1: place in the lab involved useless or meaningless information units.
Speaker 1: So researchers, for example, might try to see how well
Speaker 1: subjects remember a phrase like I just made this up.
Speaker 1: The purple donkey was made of soft spoken muscular elves, Like,
Speaker 1: can you remember that word for word? The purple donkey
Speaker 1: was made by muscular elves, now, now you're close, not
Speaker 1: made of Yeah, it makes a lot more sense to
Speaker 1: say made by wo But I see, I've already messed
Speaker 1: up the origin story of the purple donkey. Statements like
Speaker 1: this have no importance in the real world, and part
Speaker 1: of what they were talking about is that we're testing
Speaker 1: for memory and things that don't have any validity to reality. Um,
Speaker 1: so the authors right that they're curious about what kind
Speaker 1: of processing subjects do with information units that might have
Speaker 1: validity in the real world. For example, factual statements like quote,
Speaker 1: the total population of Greenland is about fifty thou which
Speaker 1: at the time of the study it was I checked. Though,
Speaker 1: that seems like a lot more people than should be
Speaker 1: in Greenland, right I was. I was surprised by that. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would agree based on I'll be a limited amount
Speaker 1: of of information that I've I've read and viewed about Greenland.
Speaker 1: You know, typically in my experience, Greenland shows up in
Speaker 1: nature documentaries and of course you're going to see rather
Speaker 1: barren h locations in those films. Well, greenlanders out there
Speaker 1: in the audience. Let us know, if you're listening, what's
Speaker 1: life like up there in Greenland? I'm interested now. But
Speaker 1: anyway back, so, yeah, population of Greenland at the times
Speaker 1: about fifty and so statements like this both refer to
Speaker 1: something that could be true or false in the real world,
Speaker 1: and there are also things that people are probably uncertain about,
Speaker 1: like do you know what the actual population of Greenland
Speaker 1: is I didn't know before I looked it up, And
Speaker 1: so we know that the statement is either true or false,
Speaker 1: but we aren't sure whether it's true or false. And
Speaker 1: of course, to go back to a previous episode, you're
Speaker 1: kind of anchoring my expectations by throwing out without any
Speaker 1: population data in my head about Greenland, like that's suddenly
Speaker 1: all I have to go on. Oh yeah, that's interesting. Also,
Speaker 1: it's so like it could be three thousand or it
Speaker 1: could be like a million, and either you're sort of
Speaker 1: moving your guests range toward fifty. So the thing they
Speaker 1: point out is even though most people don't know what
Speaker 1: the population of Greenland is, we're often willing, into some
Speaker 1: extent able to make guesses as to whether statements like
Speaker 1: this are true. So where does this semantic knowledge come from?
Speaker 1: When we feel like we have knowledge to offer a
Speaker 1: guess about what the population of Greenland is even when
Speaker 1: we don't really know what is that what allows us
Speaker 1: to judge these questions? And the authors note that frequency
Speaker 1: is a really powerful variable in all kinds of judgments
Speaker 1: we make about the world, so they hypothesize that quote
Speaker 1: frequency might also serve as the major access route that
Speaker 1: plausible statements have into our pool of general knowledge. So
Speaker 1: the idea is that we build our knowledge base based
Speaker 1: on how frequently we are exposed to ideas. You hear
Speaker 1: an idea a lot, and that gets reinforced in the
Speaker 1: knowledge base. You've never heard an idea before, or you
Speaker 1: don't hear it a lot, it doesn't get reinforced and
Speaker 1: it doesn't exist in the knowledge base. So here's the
Speaker 1: experimental part. Researchers came up with a list of a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty true statements and false statements, crafted so
Speaker 1: they all sound plausible. Yeah, they could be true. You know,
Speaker 1: the average person would be unsure whether or not they're true,
Speaker 1: and the statements were on all kinds of subjects like geography,
Speaker 1: arts and literature, history, sports, current events science. A few
Speaker 1: examples of true statements included things like Cairo, Egypt has
Speaker 1: a larger population than Chicago, Illinois, and French horn players
Speaker 1: get cash bonuses to stay in the U. S. Army. Well,
Speaker 1: i'd see it. I should have joined the army after
Speaker 1: I'll see I was a french horn player really in
Speaker 1: high school. Yeah, I didn't know that. What's it like
Speaker 1: playing the French horn? It's just you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of spit and a lot of shoving your hand
Speaker 1: up horns. That's it. Otherwise it's like playing a trumpet.
Speaker 1: Now see I actually played trumpet, and it's a lot
Speaker 1: less fun than what you're describing. Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know. There is an elegance to the way you
Speaker 1: hold it and you again, you have your hand in
Speaker 1: the inside the horn. I don't know. Being a trumpet
Speaker 1: player to me always felt like being a person who's
Speaker 1: complaining at full volume. Yeah, yeah, there is. There's more
Speaker 1: of an outward stance with the trumpet, right, you are
Speaker 1: blasting outward, But in the French horn, you it's it's
Speaker 1: more like you're playing music into yourself. That's quite beautiful,
Speaker 1: more beautiful than any music I've ever played on the
Speaker 1: French horn. Uh so we got to get back to
Speaker 1: the study. Okay, So that's that's supposedly true. French horn
Speaker 1: players at the time got cash bonuses to stay in
Speaker 1: the U. S. Army. Examples of false statements where things
Speaker 1: like the People's Republic of China was founded in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty seven, who was actually nineteen forty nine, or the
Speaker 1: copy Bara is the largest of the marsupials. That's not true.
Speaker 1: The largest marcipial is the red kangaroo. The largest known
Speaker 1: in the fossil record is this thing called the extinct
Speaker 1: dip protodon. Now that in the capy bar is a rodent, right,
Speaker 1: only is the capy bar and marsupial. I didn't even
Speaker 1: look it up. I only know that because I go
Speaker 1: to a lot of zoos these days. But it is
Speaker 1: a mammal, it's a it's a rodent. It is a mammal,
Speaker 1: and it is a rodent, not a marsupial. Well, there
Speaker 1: we go. So it's wrong in multiple ways. So you
Speaker 1: got this big list that came up with of true
Speaker 1: and false statements, and all of them should sound plausible
Speaker 1: to the average person, But most people are not going
Speaker 1: to be likely to know for sure whether they're true
Speaker 1: unless they just happen to have some special random knowledge
Speaker 1: or expertise. And so researchers held three sessions with participants,
Speaker 1: each separated by two weeks, and on each of the sessions,
Speaker 1: the participants were played back a tape of a selection
Speaker 1: of sixty recorded statements from that list, and the subjects
Speaker 1: were asked to judge how confident they were that the
Speaker 1: statements were true. And this was on a scale of
Speaker 1: one to seven, with like four being uncertain, five being
Speaker 1: possibly true, six being probably true, seven being definitely true.
Speaker 1: And in each session, some of the statements were true,
Speaker 1: some were false. But here's where the real magic happened.
Speaker 1: At the second session and the third session. Each time,
Speaker 1: subjects got a mix of new true and false statements
Speaker 1: that they've never seen before, plus true and false statements
Speaker 1: that they had already seen in the previous sessions. So
Speaker 1: while most of the claims they saw were new, a
Speaker 1: minority got repeated each time. And what the researchers found
Speaker 1: was that whether a statement was true or false, the
Speaker 1: more times the students saw it, the more they believed it.
Speaker 1: So again, this would be this, this, this would be
Speaker 1: the principle in action. The more they're hearing this, uh,
Speaker 1: this this false fact, the more they're coming to believe
Speaker 1: that it is true. Yeah, even in this constrained, kind
Speaker 1: of weird experimental context where they're aware that some of
Speaker 1: these facts are going to be false, it's not like
Speaker 1: they're being told this persuasively by a person trying to
Speaker 1: convince them. They're just reading this from a list of
Speaker 1: statements that are known to be either true or false.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no there's no persuasive aspect to this
Speaker 1: at all, right, right, these are not politically charged or
Speaker 1: really charged by worldview at all. They're they're just plain
Speaker 1: neutral statements that really have very little interest to most people.
Speaker 1: Also probably, but what happened was whether the statement was
Speaker 1: true or false, people believed it more if they saw
Speaker 1: it more times. So I've got a little chart in
Speaker 1: here of what happened with the false statements. You can
Speaker 1: have a look at Robert as you can see the
Speaker 1: new false statements. The false statements people saw the very
Speaker 1: first time covered around you know, like four or four
Speaker 1: point one across all three sessions. That would correspond to
Speaker 1: people saying they're uncertain. I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: whether French horn players get a cash bonus for staying
Speaker 1: in the army and playing into the self and sticking
Speaker 1: the hand up the horn. But in the second session
Speaker 1: there repeated false statements jumped up from about four point
Speaker 1: over four point one to about four point five, and
Speaker 1: then in the third session up again to about four
Speaker 1: point seven. And we only saw what happened with two
Speaker 1: sessions who knows what have happened, what might have happened
Speaker 1: if you had continued adding more sessions. So just seeing
Speaker 1: a statement more than once appeared to make it more believable,
Speaker 1: even though it wasn't true. And the pattern was roughly
Speaker 1: the same for true statements, which isn't all that surprising
Speaker 1: since the experiment was based on, you know, statements that
Speaker 1: people didn't know whether they were true or false to
Speaker 1: begin with. So the authors wrote in conclusion, quote, the
Speaker 1: present research has demonstrated that the repetition of a plausible
Speaker 1: statement increases a person's belief in the referentialvalidity or truth
Speaker 1: of that statement. I don't know why they had to
Speaker 1: say referential validity. They could have just said truth. That's
Speaker 1: that's some science writing for you. Uh, in the truth
Speaker 1: of that statement. And indeed, the present experiment appears to
Speaker 1: lend empirical support to the idea that quote, if people
Speaker 1: are told something often enough, they'll believe it. Uh So so, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is the first real study to find
Speaker 1: this and a few other things the authors thought were
Speaker 1: worth considering. Uh. The fact that this effect was displayed
Speaker 1: in statements from a big, broad pool of different types
Speaker 1: of subject matter suggests this is not extremely context dependent. Right,
Speaker 1: It's not just going to be political beliefs that are
Speaker 1: subject to this. It seems to be all different kinds
Speaker 1: of statements in all different kinds of domains. Another thing
Speaker 1: they noted was that the effect was present for true
Speaker 1: statements and false statements. Either way, if students saw the
Speaker 1: claims more often, they believed them with greater confidence. But
Speaker 1: another takeaway is that the effect is not huge for
Speaker 1: false statements. Through exposures was roughly enough to get you
Speaker 1: from I'm uncertain too. It's possibly true, but as we
Speaker 1: mentioned before, how many this is just two or three
Speaker 1: sessions right right? Right? Who knows what what would have
Speaker 1: happened if maybe you had done this more times in
Speaker 1: a row, or if there had been other factors affecting
Speaker 1: whether people were likely to believe these things to begin with,
Speaker 1: say if they had valences to the person's political identity
Speaker 1: or something like that. Yeah, you know, as we're researching
Speaker 1: this into and discussing it, I couldn't help but think
Speaker 1: of notable examples of uh false stories about generally like
Speaker 1: like celebrities from the past, And I'm not going to
Speaker 1: mention any of them specifically, Why not well, because you know,
Speaker 1: they all tend to be a bit crude. There. There
Speaker 1: are several of them about like tearing down various sort
Speaker 1: of you know, pretty boy rockers or actors from the past,
Speaker 1: uh in in the in. The interesting thing about him
Speaker 1: is these are generally like pre internet um stories that
Speaker 1: had circulate the word of mouth or I think in
Speaker 1: one case there was talk of like a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of of facts is going out in Hollywood where someone
Speaker 1: was just basically just wanted to take somebody down because
Speaker 1: they didn't like them. I remember, I think like ninth
Speaker 1: grade here starting to hear this bizarre story about Richard
Speaker 1: gear Yeah, that's that's the main one I'm thinking of.
Speaker 1: And I think it basically comes down to Richard Geary's
Speaker 1: a is a handsome, successful guy and and for a
Speaker 1: lot of people you want to like, really, you know,
Speaker 1: knock him down and not you Yeah, and uh and
Speaker 1: so when you encounter a bit of slander or libel
Speaker 1: like that or uh, just a ridiculous story, you're gonna
Speaker 1: be more inclined to believe it if you kind of
Speaker 1: want it to be true, right or if you or
Speaker 1: you're like, yeah, let screw that guy. I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go ahead and believe this, or even if I
Speaker 1: don't believe it, I'm gonna pass it on. But either way,
Speaker 1: whether or not you're predisposed to believe it's true, it
Speaker 1: looks like this initial study at least provides evidence that
Speaker 1: you would be more disposed to believe it's true in
Speaker 1: either case. Like, so, whatever you're starting point is, it's
Speaker 1: gonna nudge you up. Like if nothing else, it becomes
Speaker 1: word association. Like if you're not really a fan of say,
Speaker 1: Richard Gear's work, uh, and you can't name your your
Speaker 1: favorite Richard Gear film off the top of your head,
Speaker 1: that might be the primary keyword that pops up when
Speaker 1: you hear his name. Yeah, it could be. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so this bizarre effect that we're talking about, where
Speaker 1: hearing a fact repeated, even if you've got no good
Speaker 1: reason to believe it's true, just hearing it repeated causes
Speaker 1: you to be more likely to believe it. This came
Speaker 1: to be known first as the truth effect, and then
Speaker 1: later on probably a better title was the illusory truth effect.
Speaker 1: I think we should use the second one because otherwise
Speaker 1: that makes it sound true. Yeah, it just makes it
Speaker 1: sound like, yeah, if you if you repeat something, then
Speaker 1: it is then it is true. There is no question anymore. So.
Speaker 1: The basic version of the illusory truth effect is quote.
Speaker 1: People are more likely to judge repeated statements as true
Speaker 1: compared to new statements. In another way of putting it
Speaker 1: is that, all other things being equal, you're more likely
Speaker 1: to believe a claim if you've heard it before than
Speaker 1: one you haven't heard before. And the more times you
Speaker 1: hear the claim, the more likely you are to believe it.
Speaker 1: But so far we've just talked about one study, right,
Speaker 1: this this one seven study. Uh, we can call it
Speaker 1: the Star Wars study if you want. Okay, uh, the
Speaker 1: Star Wars study. Here. It's a fairly small sample, just
Speaker 1: one study. If you want to be skeptical and rigorous,
Speaker 1: maybe especially because this backs up ful quisdom, which is
Speaker 1: always something you should be careful about. We should see
Speaker 1: if the effect has been replicated by other researchers, and boy,
Speaker 1: howdy it has. That's right. This next one comes to
Speaker 1: us from nineteen seventy nine Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human
Speaker 1: Learning and Memory, the work of Frederick T. Bacon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was called the Credibility of Repeated statements memory for trivia,
Speaker 1: so Bacon performed he was trying to replicate this this effect.
Speaker 1: He performed additional experiments to test the previous team's conclusions
Speaker 1: and add some new on So his first experiment, you
Speaker 1: got ninety eight undergrads and they had two sessions in
Speaker 1: which they were asked to rate sentences as true or false,
Speaker 1: with three weeks between the two sessions, and Bacon found
Speaker 1: that the repetition illusory truth effect was modulated by whether
Speaker 1: the subjects consciously believed that a sentence had been repeated.
Speaker 1: That is, if they remembered that they had seen the
Speaker 1: sentence last time, they were more inclined to believe it.
Speaker 1: If they believed they were seeing a sentence for the
Speaker 1: first time, they were less likely to believe it. And
Speaker 1: this was true regardless of the statements themselves. I can't
Speaker 1: help but think of our modern version of this with
Speaker 1: Facebook feed right, because you're inevitably, if you're your Facebook user,
Speaker 1: or perhaps if you're a Twitter user or some other
Speaker 1: social media you're you're scrolling down right and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of sentences coming at you. Some you just
Speaker 1: kind of read in passing, so maybe you don't read
Speaker 1: at all. But are you actually stopping to really think
Speaker 1: about what a particular headline or you know, or paragraph
Speaker 1: is saying, or to just kind of scrolling in the
Speaker 1: background of your mind. Yeah, And the results of this
Speaker 1: one experiment here would seem to indicate if it has validity,
Speaker 1: it would mean that the ones you stop and pay
Speaker 1: attention to and make a memory about are the ones
Speaker 1: you're more likely to believe later on. But then also
Speaker 1: in another experiment, he had a group of sixty four
Speaker 1: undergrads and he replicated the illusory truth effect and found
Speaker 1: that students believed repeated statements to be more credible even
Speaker 1: if the students were informed that the statements were being repeated.
Speaker 1: So you can directly tell somebody, Hey, I know, I
Speaker 1: just asked you if it was true or false that
Speaker 1: zebras could automatically detach their own tongues and fling the
Speaker 1: tongues at attacking hyenas. I asked you that same thing
Speaker 1: three weeks ago. It may or may not be true.
Speaker 1: And even in this case, repeating the statement still makes
Speaker 1: them judge it to be more true than statements they're
Speaker 1: seeing for the first time. So you can warn people
Speaker 1: that something fishy is going on and they still fall
Speaker 1: for it. So you could you could straight up share
Speaker 1: a piece of just undeniably fake news on social media
Speaker 1: and and said, hey, guys, this is this is some
Speaker 1: fake news. This has been totally debunked. Um, you can
Speaker 1: look it up on Snopes, etcetera. And that's still not
Speaker 1: going to completely disarm the piece that you're sharing. Well,
Speaker 1: we will talk, so I would say, yes, we will
Speaker 1: talk more about that in the second episode where this
Speaker 1: kind of thing comes into conflict with real world beliefs.
Speaker 1: And just to be clear, I made up that zebra
Speaker 1: thing that that wasn't find of the Bacon study. Okay,
Speaker 1: I thought that would be clear. But that's number one,
Speaker 1: not true. Number two as far as I know, not
Speaker 1: one of the examples Bacon used. Right, Well, I'm sorry
Speaker 1: you had to drag Zebras into all of this. Joe. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I like the idea of a weaponized tongue
Speaker 1: that's gonna go beyond the X men. Surely that exists
Speaker 1: in reality. Well yes, but but not with Zebras. No. No,
Speaker 1: I guess that's amphibians and stuff. Okay, okay, So back
Speaker 1: to the study, So Bacon says in his abstract quote.
Speaker 1: It was further determined that statements that contradicted early ones
Speaker 1: were rated as relatively true if misclassified as repetitions, but
Speaker 1: that statements judged to be changed were rated as relatively false.
Speaker 1: So even if you misremember that you saw something before,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to believe it's true. It's kind of odd.
Speaker 1: That makes you wonder, what is the initial uh, what's
Speaker 1: the initial stimulus that caused you to misremember that you
Speaker 1: had seen it before. Well, as we've discussed on the
Speaker 1: show before, I mean, there are multiple ways that false
Speaker 1: memories can be can be encoded. Oh yeah, absolutely. So
Speaker 1: Bacon concludes that basically, people are predisposed to believe statements
Speaker 1: that affirm existing knowledge and to disbelieve statements that contradict
Speaker 1: existing knowledge. That's not all that unusual, right, But but
Speaker 1: it's specifically the repetition effect that seems to be playing
Speaker 1: a role here. Let's take a look at another study.
Speaker 1: How about nine two Maryan Schwartz Repetition and Rated truth
Speaker 1: Value of Statements from the American Journal of Psychology. So
Speaker 1: Schwartz here conducted two experiments on what psychologists were by
Speaker 1: this time calling the truth effect, what we're calling the
Speaker 1: illusory truth effect UM. So experiment one, you get a
Speaker 1: group of subjects and they rate claims on a seven
Speaker 1: point truth value scale. Just like in the first study,
Speaker 1: the Star Wars study, the seventy seven study, UM and
Speaker 1: a different group of subjects rated the same statements on
Speaker 1: a seven point scale of how familiar they were with
Speaker 1: the statements before the experiment started. How familiar are you
Speaker 1: with this? Repetition increased both ratings, So both pre experimental
Speaker 1: familiarity as well as the perceived truth value, they both
Speaker 1: went up when people saw them more than once. That's
Speaker 1: not surprising. Again the replication and then also the fact
Speaker 1: that you have seen something before, we'll tend to make
Speaker 1: you more familiar with it. Then you've got another experiment here.
Speaker 1: Second one replicated the illusory truth effect. Again found that
Speaker 1: it didn't matter whether you mixed up repeated statements that
Speaker 1: people had seen before with new statements or only showed
Speaker 1: them repeated statement. Either way, belief and repeated statements went up.
Speaker 1: And this was done so that they could rule out
Speaker 1: the possibility they're thinking, you know, maybe it's only by
Speaker 1: contrast with new and unfamiliar statements that repeated ones seem
Speaker 1: more credible. That is not the case either way you
Speaker 1: do it. If you've seen it before, you believe it more.
Speaker 1: And so this study has taken as evidence that the
Speaker 1: feeling of familiarity with an idea might be an important part,
Speaker 1: or even the most important part, of how we judge
Speaker 1: something as true or plausible. But we should shift to
Speaker 1: asking the question of why why would increasing familiarity with
Speaker 1: the statement through repetition make it seem more true to us?
Speaker 1: It makes me think about this passage from Wittgenstein in
Speaker 1: his philosophical Investigations, about how absurd it would be to
Speaker 1: use repetition of a mental representation as evidence that the
Speaker 1: representation is correct. He writes, quote for example, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I've remembered the time of departure of a
Speaker 1: train right, And to check it, I call to mind
Speaker 1: how a age of the timetable looked. Is it the
Speaker 1: same here? No, For this process has got to produce
Speaker 1: a memory which is actually correct. If the mental image
Speaker 1: of the timetable could not itself be tested for correctness,
Speaker 1: how could it confirm the correctness of the first memory.
Speaker 1: As if someone were to buy several copies of the
Speaker 1: morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.
Speaker 1: And that's that's kind of what we're doing. Like he's
Speaker 1: talking about mental images, but the general point is a
Speaker 1: good one. We're essentially buying several copies of the same
Speaker 1: newspaper to to increase our belief that what the newspaper
Speaker 1: says is actually accurate. Now, one it possible interpretation that
Speaker 1: comes to mind is just like the idea of say,
Speaker 1: walking us picking out stepping stones to cross a creek. Right,
Speaker 1: you step to one stone and it doesn't slip out
Speaker 1: from underneath you, and so you use that too to
Speaker 1: make your way across the other stones and hopefully make
Speaker 1: it across the entire creek without getting your feet wet
Speaker 1: or falling in being swept down stream to the to
Speaker 1: the waterfall. So to what extent are we just like
Speaker 1: trusting anything that hasn't resulted in catastrophe thus fire? Well,
Speaker 1: I would say that it would make more sense for
Speaker 1: that to be true with sort of embodied physical experimental
Speaker 1: knowledge about the world than it would for that to
Speaker 1: make sense for that to apply to semantic knowledge of
Speaker 1: things people tell us. Or maybe our brains just aren't
Speaker 1: good at differentiating between semantic knowledge that's imparted through words.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe somebody saying all those stones will hold
Speaker 1: you up is encoded by the brain in sort of
Speaker 1: the same way as testing out one stone at a time. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. So this is what we should explore
Speaker 1: for the rest of the episode. I think, why should
Speaker 1: repeatedly exposing ourselves to the same information increase our confidence
Speaker 1: in it if we didn't have good reasons to believe
Speaker 1: it the first time. It's clear that this is what's happening,
Speaker 1: But why does it happen this way? All right, we'll
Speaker 1: take one more break and when we im back, well
Speaker 1: we'll jump into this. Thank thank Alright, we're back. So
Speaker 1: we're asking this question of why repeatedly exposing ourselves to
Speaker 1: the same information would increase our confidence if we didn't
Speaker 1: have good reasons to believe the information the first time.
Speaker 1: It's clear from several experiments that this is what happens
Speaker 1: in our brains if if a statement is repeated, we
Speaker 1: believe it more. But why do our brains work that way?
Speaker 1: It doesn't necessarily make sense. Yeah, And one possible interpretation
Speaker 1: that came to mind is, of course, we we've touched
Speaker 1: on this before that that we're all social animals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I've I've wondered if there this is a byproduct
Speaker 1: of the drive to fit in with a given group
Speaker 1: or tribe, that there's ultimately a survival advantage and getting
Speaker 1: along with the group, and so does that bleed over
Speaker 1: into highly repeated or highly circulated lies or untruths. So
Speaker 1: basically like, if there is a lie going around in
Speaker 1: the group, you'll get along with the group better if
Speaker 1: you just accept the lie. Yeah, And I'm not know
Speaker 1: certainly after looking at more of the research, I'm not
Speaker 1: arguing that that is the core um mechanism involved here.
Speaker 1: This is worth exploring that. But but I but I
Speaker 1: do like wonder to what extent that is that's playing
Speaker 1: a role, because you we we all have our our
Speaker 1: groups that we are involved in, our our our friends,
Speaker 1: our family, or our work groups, our social media groups
Speaker 1: are are sort of echo chambers that we find online.
Speaker 1: And uh, does it make you more susceptible to the
Speaker 1: lie just because there is this this ingrained need to
Speaker 1: fit in with that group too, to share the same
Speaker 1: values and to put it all in the prehistoric framework,
Speaker 1: to to continue to have access to the fire and
Speaker 1: the and the feast. Yeah, I think I think that's
Speaker 1: the possibility worth exploring. Let's let's take a look at it. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I started looking into this a little bit, and I
Speaker 1: ran across a paper titled the Evolution of Misbelief, Misbelief,
Speaker 1: Misbelief from two thousand nine. This is published in Behavioral
Speaker 1: and Brain Sciences, and it was by Ryan T. McKay
Speaker 1: and Daniel in it. Oh, Daniel's in it all right.
Speaker 1: So they approached the following I guess you could call
Speaker 1: a paradox in the paper. Given that we evolve to
Speaker 1: thrive in a fact based world, what other kind of
Speaker 1: world could there? Exactly? Yeah, I mean, we we're dealing
Speaker 1: with with with actual reality here. But but given that
Speaker 1: we've evolved to thrive in this world, shouldn't true beliefs
Speaker 1: be adaptive and misbeliefs be maladaptive. It's clear that in
Speaker 1: many cases, probably most cases, that is the way things are. Right.
Speaker 1: Believing that you are able to fly off the edge
Speaker 1: of a cliff is not good for you. Believing that
Speaker 1: polar bears want to cuddle with you is not advantageous.
Speaker 1: Holding false beliefs like this doesn't work out well for people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're reckless and dangerous misbeliefs that clearly like,
Speaker 1: if you reach the point where you're believing in that,
Speaker 1: you're going to go extinct. So it's obvious that there
Speaker 1: is going to be at least some kind of major
Speaker 1: selection pressure in the brain for shaping brains that believe
Speaker 1: sly true things, unless there are cases where believing something
Speaker 1: that's false outweighs the negative the drawbacks essentially. So here
Speaker 1: here's a here's what they wrote quote on this assumption,
Speaker 1: our beliefs about the world are essentially tools that enable
Speaker 1: us to act effectively in the world. Moreover, to be reliable,
Speaker 1: such tools must be produced in us, it is assumed
Speaker 1: by systems designed by evolution to be truth aiming and
Speaker 1: hence barring miracles, these systems must be designed to generate
Speaker 1: grounded beliefs. A system for generating ungrounded but mostly true
Speaker 1: beliefs would be an oracle, as impossible as a perpetual
Speaker 1: motion machine. I like that. Yeah, So there's got to
Speaker 1: be like a grounding procedure through which we can discover
Speaker 1: true beliefs if we're going to have them. Otherwise we're
Speaker 1: just talking about magic. But we have to account for
Speaker 1: these varying levels of misbelief and self deception in the
Speaker 1: human experience. They write, if evolution has designed us to
Speaker 1: appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how
Speaker 1: are we to account for the routine exceptions to this
Speaker 1: rule instances of misbelief? Most of us at times believe
Speaker 1: propositions that end up being disproved. Many of us produce
Speaker 1: beliefs that others consider obviously false to begin with, and
Speaker 1: some of his form beliefs that are not just manifestly
Speaker 1: but bizarrely false. How can this be? Are all these
Speaker 1: misbeliefs just accidents, incidences of pathology or breakdown, or at
Speaker 1: best undesirable but tolerable byproducts. Might some of them contrat
Speaker 1: the default presumption be adaptive in and of themselves. I
Speaker 1: like this distinction they're making. I think this is actually useful.
Speaker 1: So they're breaking misbeliefs down into two basic kinds of
Speaker 1: categories right right that they're talking about one those resulting
Speaker 1: from a breakdown in the normal functioning of the belief
Speaker 1: formation system. This would be delusions malfunctions, So things like
Speaker 1: face blindness or or catard syndrow. Okay, this is when
Speaker 1: the brain is creating incorrect beliefs because it's not working right,
Speaker 1: it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing. But
Speaker 1: then the second category are those that are arising in
Speaker 1: the normal course of that system's operations, so beliefs based
Speaker 1: on incomplete or inaccurate information. These would be this would
Speaker 1: be a case of manufacture. And we'll get into examples
Speaker 1: of this in a second. There could be tons of examples.
Speaker 1: One that comes to my mind that would be an
Speaker 1: example of this would be optical illusions. When you when
Speaker 1: you witness an optical illusion, you have a false belief
Speaker 1: that has been generated by your brain. But it's not
Speaker 1: because your brain is doing anything wrong. It's just because,
Speaker 1: like it's being exploited by a situation that's not part
Speaker 1: of its normal what it normally needs to do. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they point out that it's it's easy to think of
Speaker 1: these in light of of an artifact. Is it failing
Speaker 1: due to a limitation in the design in a way
Speaker 1: that is culpable or tolerable. Examples here being say a
Speaker 1: clock that doesn't keep time keep good time versus a
Speaker 1: toaster of and that doesn't keep time at all. You
Speaker 1: can't expect the toast drivant to keep time unless it's
Speaker 1: got a time right. Well, yes, but that's true. Yes,
Speaker 1: I would have said a purple donkey built by muscular
Speaker 1: elves that doesn't keep because he wouldn't even expect yes now.
Speaker 1: But but it gets more complicated when you go into
Speaker 1: the biological realm, because what counts as immune function, dysfunction,
Speaker 1: a pathogen infection, but what it would have Ultimately, the
Speaker 1: immune system airs by defending the body against say, a
Speaker 1: transplant organ, and may ensure its survival because the body
Speaker 1: is going to reject that attempt, to reject that that
Speaker 1: heart transplant. Uh, even though the heart transplant could save
Speaker 1: the patient, will save the patients. So it seems like
Speaker 1: in order to understand this, you almost have to understand
Speaker 1: the context, right right. They say that they invoked the
Speaker 1: work of Ruth Garrett Milliken, who in saying that we
Speaker 1: can't look to an organ's current properties or disposition, we
Speaker 1: have to look to its history. That makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: Organ transplants, of course, are not part of our evolutionary history.
Speaker 1: So this is just the body function normally in rejecting
Speaker 1: the invader heart. Right, The body is not malfunctioning is
Speaker 1: doing what it's supposed to do. We're just throwing a
Speaker 1: situation at it that it's not prepared to deal with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that brings us to the more human examples, you know,
Speaker 1: lies and uh and so forth. Oh, that's interesting. So
Speaker 1: a lie could be like a thing that our bodies
Speaker 1: were not really prepared to deal with very well, which
Speaker 1: is weird to think of because of how common lies are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they right. However adaptive it may be for us to
Speaker 1: believe truly, it may be adaptive for other parties if
Speaker 1: we believe falsely. Now that and of course this is
Speaker 1: something just to to interject here, I think this is
Speaker 1: something that we ultimately see holds holds true with other animals,
Speaker 1: like the role of deception of course in u in
Speaker 1: in in certainly in hunting, in defense, and even acquiring mates.
Speaker 1: They continue. An evolutionary arms race of deceptive ploys and
Speaker 1: counterploys may thus ensue. In some cases, the other parties
Speaker 1: in question may not even be animate agents, but cultural
Speaker 1: traits or systems. Although such cases are interesting in their
Speaker 1: own right, the adaptive misbeliefs we pursue in this article
Speaker 1: are beneficial to their consumers. Misbeliefs that evolved to the
Speaker 1: detriment of their believers are not our quarries, so they
Speaker 1: stress the difference between beliefs and what they referred to
Speaker 1: as a leafs uh and uh. So for instance, if
Speaker 1: I'm freaked out by tall buildings, I might not believe
Speaker 1: that I'm going to fall off, but I might a
Speaker 1: lieve that I'm going to fall off. They leave as
Speaker 1: in like like a moral yes. Yeah, And in this
Speaker 1: case it seems to be something that is tall, a
Speaker 1: tolerated side effect of an imperfect system. But it's not
Speaker 1: McKay and Dinnett that end up bringing up the illusory
Speaker 1: truth effect, but psychologists Pascal boy Yer in commentary on
Speaker 1: the paper. Uh, this particular paper from from McKay and
Speaker 1: dine Itt, by the ways, available online. I'll try to
Speaker 1: include a link to it on the landing page for
Speaker 1: this episode. But in his commentary, a boy A rights
Speaker 1: dramatic memory distortion seem to influence belief fixation. For instance,
Speaker 1: in the illusory truth effect, statements read several times are
Speaker 1: more likely rated as true than statements read only once.
Speaker 1: People who repeatedly imagine performing a particular action may end
Speaker 1: up believing they actually performed it. Oh, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: something I've read before. If yeah, if so, if you
Speaker 1: just like have people walk through a task in their
Speaker 1: mind and then ask them later if they remember doing it.
Speaker 1: A lot of times they remember physically acting it out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've certainly had this occur with me, Like There'll be
Speaker 1: something I need to do and I'm thinking about doing it,
Speaker 1: and then I can't remember if I actually carried it out. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is uh, this is called imagination inflation. He writes.
Speaker 1: Misinformation paradigms show that most people are vulnerable to memory revision.
Speaker 1: When plausible information is implied by experimenters in social contagion protocols,
Speaker 1: people tend to believe they actually saw what is in
Speaker 1: fact suggested by the confederate with whom they watched a video.
Speaker 1: So that he's just listing lots of the ways that
Speaker 1: we are end up with false beliefs. There's a plethora
Speaker 1: of examples of mechanisms for putting false beliefs in our brains. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I know there's a lot of territory covered in this
Speaker 1: paper in the attached responses, but I can't I come
Speaker 1: back to the sort of key reason that I sought
Speaker 1: it out like, like, when is self self deception helpful?
Speaker 1: Is it necessary for the deception of others? It doesn't
Speaker 1: quite seem to be, like, you don't have to believe
Speaker 1: the lie yourself to tell someone else the lie, regardless
Speaker 1: of what telling the lie repeatedly might do to you. Well, so, boy,
Speaker 1: he's skeptical of the idea, right, So is he basically
Speaker 1: saying like, you don't want to overstate the the adaptiveness
Speaker 1: of believing lies, but yeah, he drives sound that memory
Speaker 1: need only be as good as the advantage and decision
Speaker 1: making it affords. Okay, so he's essentially going for the
Speaker 1: byproduct thing for most most beliefs He's he's saying like, look,
Speaker 1: you know, memory needs to do certain things, and in
Speaker 1: the course of doing those things, it may generate some
Speaker 1: false beliefs. We don't have to assume that those false
Speaker 1: beliefs themselves are beneficial, right, Yeah. And And to come
Speaker 1: back to McKay and Dinnett, they point out that natural
Speaker 1: selection doesn't seem to care about truth. It only cares
Speaker 1: about reproductive success, so that there are various cases where
Speaker 1: a particular false belief or misbelief is seemingly adaptive. You
Speaker 1: believe in a non existent fire god. Okay, but say
Speaker 1: that its laws inhibit overt selfish behavior gets you in
Speaker 1: trouble and not work out for you in the long run.
Speaker 1: So in that case, you have an adaptive misbelief. Now,
Speaker 1: if the fire God wherever to actually appear, then this
Speaker 1: would be an adaptive belief. But then there are arguably
Speaker 1: a whole host of other false ideas that seem adaptive,
Speaker 1: positive self deceptions about ability, the placebo effect for instance. Um,
Speaker 1: they bring up the self theories of intelligence, entity and
Speaker 1: incremental view of intelligence. Um, this being like, m am,
Speaker 1: I born with a certain in uh intellect? Or do
Speaker 1: I develop it over time? And how those different core
Speaker 1: beliefs can affect your effectiveness in life Like doesn't mean like, oh,
Speaker 1: I've got to work really hard in order to stay
Speaker 1: stay on top of this, or is it a situation
Speaker 1: where oh, I'm I'm brilliant, I can accomplish anything. And and
Speaker 1: and of course I think you can argue for pitfalls
Speaker 1: on both sides. And of course there's always the optimal
Speaker 1: margin of illusion in play, which comes to us from
Speaker 1: Roy f Ball moister. Uh. And you know, ultimately crazy
Speaker 1: over confidence as we do as we discussed is going
Speaker 1: to lead to extinction? Right, you don't want to cuddle
Speaker 1: the polar bear. Right, cuddling the polar bear thinking you
Speaker 1: can fly? Uh, these are going to lead you falling
Speaker 1: off the side of a mountain or winding up in
Speaker 1: a polar bear's tummy. Yeah. Now, I could certainly understand
Speaker 1: the idea of socially adaptive misbeliefs. I think that thing.
Speaker 1: Those things definitely do exist, and in some cases there
Speaker 1: might be some overlap with the types of things that
Speaker 1: get repeated so often, Like reasons for believing untrue things
Speaker 1: can also compound each other. I mean, I'm I'm about
Speaker 1: to explain why I think false beliefs gained through exposure
Speaker 1: and repetition are not adaptive in themselves. But you can
Speaker 1: have more than one reason for believing something that's untrue.
Speaker 1: Think about objectively untrue statements that get repeated, as we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier, in a political context. The evidence
Speaker 1: shows that we believe them partially because of how often
Speaker 1: they repeated, but there's also social cognition and also identity
Speaker 1: protective cognition. In other words, we tend to believe things
Speaker 1: that members of our political tribe and social in groups, say,
Speaker 1: and for social cohesion reasons that that is adaptive for us.
Speaker 1: We also believe things that validate our sense of personal identity.
Speaker 1: But I think it's pretty clear that that these types
Speaker 1: of effects can work in a nasty perverse tag team format,
Speaker 1: boosting and complementing one another. But even if we we
Speaker 1: put aside these complementary effects, put aside uh social and
Speaker 1: identity protective cognition, put those aside, and just focus on
Speaker 1: the explanation for the illusory truth effect and repetition, there's
Speaker 1: a really interesting thing that comes out. And this is
Speaker 1: based on the idea of processing fluency, which is it's
Speaker 1: a it's a concept that is way more interesting than
Speaker 1: the name would let you believe. So the dominant explanation
Speaker 1: for the illusory truth effect in the psychology literature, which
Speaker 1: we're about to get into, um fits into this byproduct
Speaker 1: category that we were just talking about. Based on all
Speaker 1: I've read, it seems the informed majority opinion of psychologists
Speaker 1: is that the illusion of truth that we get from
Speaker 1: exposure and repetition is an unfortunate byproduct of generally useful
Speaker 1: cognitive heuristic. Now, a heuristic, as we've talked about before,
Speaker 1: is a mental shortcut. It's a fast and cheap trick
Speaker 1: that the brain uses to arrive at a judgment or
Speaker 1: produce some kind of result without using too much effort.
Speaker 1: And it's it's worth driving home that our brains need
Speaker 1: fast and cheap tricks. Yeah, brains are very energy hungry.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, there's only there's only so much power to
Speaker 1: go around there. So it's, uh, it's kind of has
Speaker 1: to hold everything together with a bunch of of of
Speaker 1: cheap tricks. Yeah, so it works something like this. Let's
Speaker 1: let's go on, let's go with it. Assume that on balance,
Speaker 1: true statements get uttered more often than lies. As cynical
Speaker 1: as we like to be, that's probably true, right, True
Speaker 1: statements are generally more useful to people. Also, there's a
Speaker 1: sort of convergence effect where there's only one way for
Speaker 1: a true statement to be true, but there are lots
Speaker 1: of different ways to say a lie about the subject
Speaker 1: of that statement. So like, true statements on the subject
Speaker 1: are going to be more consistent usually than lies about
Speaker 1: the subject because a lie about the subject could be
Speaker 1: anything well, and also lies lies it in large part
Speaker 1: have to be believable. Like think about the various true
Speaker 1: statements and uh and false statements that might be uttered
Speaker 1: during the course of a given day at work. Yeah, somebody, hey,
Speaker 1: we're the bathroom, you know, it's a new building. Say.
Speaker 1: Then they're they're gonna probably say, oh, it's over there,
Speaker 1: and they're they're they're probably going to tell you the truth.
Speaker 1: Generally does not serve people well to lie about the
Speaker 1: location of the bathroom, right because you're gonna find out
Speaker 1: and then you're gonna say, hey, why did you tell
Speaker 1: me the bathroom is over there and not over there?
Speaker 1: Are you insane? But then some of the false statements
Speaker 1: you're liable to hear might be, hey, if you uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, let's see have you started on that
Speaker 1: report yet, Let's do on Friday, And they'll say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've got it, I've got it taken care of. I'll
Speaker 1: get it to you on Friday. You know. There there's
Speaker 1: there are a lot of statements like that that are
Speaker 1: that ultimately you can't really check in on, like you're
Speaker 1: just gonna have to take their word for it, right,
Speaker 1: and that kind of lie. Yeah, you'll never find out,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah exactly. Or I can't come into work
Speaker 1: today because I'm sick. Well, all right, I'm you know,
Speaker 1: we're not going to ask for a doctor's note. You
Speaker 1: might be lying, you might not, but it's just kind
Speaker 1: of a gimme on that situation. Yeah, that's another reason
Speaker 1: that we're more likely to be exposed to true statements generally,
Speaker 1: or at least that were more likely to detect true
Speaker 1: statements generally, because false statements are harder to verify, usually
Speaker 1: by design of the person making them. So you're able
Speaker 1: to find yourself in an environment it's mostly built out
Speaker 1: of true statements and believable lies. Right, So on this assumption,
Speaker 1: you know you're you're in a hurry, and your brain
Speaker 1: it is not designed to consume infinite energy. It wants
Speaker 1: to try to be efficient. You don't have time to
Speaker 1: evaluate all claims rigorously. I mean, even no matter how
Speaker 1: skeptical you want to be, we can confirm this eventually.
Speaker 1: You are just not going to have time to look
Speaker 1: into everything you believe. You're just gonna have to take
Speaker 1: somebody's word for it. It's not practical to try to
Speaker 1: live by verifying every single belief. Oh yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it would. You've just got to have something firm underneath
Speaker 1: your feet in order to proceed. Oh yeah, you've got
Speaker 1: a bedrock, but then you've also got to have you
Speaker 1: just I mean, you take somebody's word on where the
Speaker 1: bathroom is, like, you're not gonna try to fact check them,
Speaker 1: you know, well, I guess you will by trying to
Speaker 1: go there. But other other things like that, mundane things
Speaker 1: people tell you throughout the day, You're just gonna have
Speaker 1: to believe them. There's just no, it doesn't make any
Speaker 1: sense to try to verify all of it because you
Speaker 1: don't have time. So therefore, an easy shortcut for assuming
Speaker 1: that a statement is more likely true is have I
Speaker 1: heard this statement before? Statements they get uttered more often
Speaker 1: are more likely to be from that class of true statements. Okay,
Speaker 1: I can roll with that. Now, there's another type of
Speaker 1: parallel thinking that says, uh, that says, you know, also,
Speaker 1: it's actually more difficult to disbelieve something than it is
Speaker 1: to believe it because and I don't know if this
Speaker 1: is really confirmed or if this is just one theory
Speaker 1: about how the information processing in the brain works. But
Speaker 1: just as a quick tangent, there is a model of
Speaker 1: thinking that says, Okay, to believe a statement is true,
Speaker 1: to hear a statement and say I believe it is
Speaker 1: just one step in the brain. To hear a statement
Speaker 1: and reject it as false is a two step procedure
Speaker 1: where first you have to hear it and believe it
Speaker 1: to understand it, and then you have to go back
Speaker 1: and revise what you just did and say, but it's
Speaker 1: not true. Yeah. It's ultimately like a king setting down
Speaker 1: at a banquet table. Right, is the king to simply
Speaker 1: eat every uh, every food item on the plate and
Speaker 1: trust in it and trust that he's not going to
Speaker 1: be poisoned or is he going to independently test each thing?
Speaker 1: Have the food taster come up, put the mid transfer
Speaker 1: this goblet of wine into the rhinoceros horn, etcetera. Hold
Speaker 1: the magic crystal over this plate of beans. And you know,
Speaker 1: another thing that came to mind was some of our
Speaker 1: discussions we've had in the past about consciousness and imagination
Speaker 1: as a simulation engine, that we use our imagination to
Speaker 1: mentally simulate possible outcomes so that we can best choose
Speaker 1: how we're going to react to the world. And when
Speaker 1: I'm presented with something that might be a lie or
Speaker 1: or of some sort of untruth or a bit of
Speaker 1: of misinformation. I still can't help but imagine it, right,
Speaker 1: I'm having to create a mental picture of it. Um
Speaker 1: in a sense, you're kind of believing it for the moment. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I have to simulate it in my head. And
Speaker 1: in cases of people who can form mental pictures, you
Speaker 1: have to form those mental pictures and uh, now you know,
Speaker 1: And I imagine a lot of this what shakes out
Speaker 1: after has to do with an individual's particular worldview. But
Speaker 1: I wonder if in some cases it's like a type
Speaker 1: one error in cognition, you know, and it's a false positive.
Speaker 1: Uh that uh, that I I'm imagining this is a
Speaker 1: possible outcome, and then maybe I'm more inclined to believe
Speaker 1: it just so that I can keep it from harming me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that's a very very reasonable way of imagining it.
Speaker 1: But so here's where we get into the final part
Speaker 1: of our discussion today, which is the idea of what
Speaker 1: I mentioned a minute ago, processing fluency. So processing fluency
Speaker 1: just means how easy it is to process incoming information.
Speaker 1: And you wouldn't believe the research, John, how many of
Speaker 1: our decisions and mental outcomes seem to be based at
Speaker 1: least in part on processing fluency. The brain really really
Speaker 1: likes things to be easy. It really likes things to
Speaker 1: be to go smooth, to not be too difficult. Uh So,
Speaker 1: to start off, based on existing research, it definitely seems
Speaker 1: true that people have an easier time processing statements and
Speaker 1: information they've heard before. In fact, Robert, you probably know
Speaker 1: this from direct experience. Like a familiar statement, when used
Speaker 1: in the context of a sentence or an argument, is
Speaker 1: processed quite smoothly, but a new, unfamiliar statement in the
Speaker 1: same context often causes you to say, wait, hold on,
Speaker 1: back up, I need to wrap my head around this.
Speaker 1: Familiar is easy. Unfamiliar is difficult. But how would you
Speaker 1: test whether the ease of processing information we're actually affecting
Speaker 1: our judgment of of the truth of a statement. And
Speaker 1: I want to get into a couple of quick, really
Speaker 1: interesting studies on this that we're so simple and so brilliant.
Speaker 1: So in Rayburn Schwartz did a study in consciousness and
Speaker 1: cognition called Effects of perceptual fluency on judgments of truth.
Speaker 1: They took true or false statements, kind of like in
Speaker 1: the studies we've seen before of the variety osorn no
Speaker 1: is in Chile, or Greenland has roughly fifty inhabitants, and
Speaker 1: they presented those statements to people, and the main independent
Speaker 1: variable was that they presented the statements either against a
Speaker 1: white background in a high contrast, easy to read color,
Speaker 1: or in a low contrast, hard to read color, and
Speaker 1: apparently that made all the difference in the world. The
Speaker 1: idea is that the hard to read one has low
Speaker 1: processing fluency, it's difficult, and the easy to read one
Speaker 1: has high processing fluency, it's easy to process. And they
Speaker 1: found that this made a big difference in what people
Speaker 1: believed was true or false. Uh quote. Moderately visible statements
Speaker 1: were judged as true at chance all, whereas highly visible
Speaker 1: statements were judged as true significantly above chance level. We
Speaker 1: conclude the perceptual fluency affects judgments of truth. This is
Speaker 1: another one that makes sense from a marketing standpoint, right,
Speaker 1: just make your message very clear, very very easily absorbed,
Speaker 1: and people will begin to buy into it. Oh, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And this has actually been studied in marketing and consumer preference.
Speaker 1: Like there is one study from Novimski at All published
Speaker 1: in two thousand seven in the Journal of Marketing Research
Speaker 1: that in short, it found that consumers more often tend
Speaker 1: to choose brands that represent ease and fluency. Like say,
Speaker 1: if the information about a brand is easy to read,
Speaker 1: consumers are more likely to choose that brand that's the
Speaker 1: one they want. So that makes me wonder why Coca
Speaker 1: Cola is written in cursive. It seems like you would
Speaker 1: want it just very clear, bold letters. Well didn't they
Speaker 1: try to change the can? When did? I haven't really
Speaker 1: looked at a can recently. Maybe it's not incursive anymore,
Speaker 1: you know, they're Actually you might have two things in conflict, right,
Speaker 1: So you could have in conflict if you if you've
Speaker 1: got an old logo that people are familiar with but
Speaker 1: it's hard to read, that the hard to read part
Speaker 1: might be undercutting their preference for it, but the fact
Speaker 1: that it's familiar might be boosting their preference for it.
Speaker 1: If you try to change it to something that's easier
Speaker 1: to read, the change might introduce more difficulty in processing
Speaker 1: than the ease of reading would improve processing. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: makes sense, all right, So I want to cite one
Speaker 1: more study, a study by Christian uncle Bach in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven from the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory,
Speaker 1: and Cognition and Uncle Bach does an interesting thing in
Speaker 1: the study where he's got a hypothesis he wants to test.
Speaker 1: He writes, quote, I argue that experienced fluency is used
Speaker 1: as a que and judgments of truth according to the
Speaker 1: cues ecological validity, meaning like successfulness in the real world.
Speaker 1: Quote that is, the truth effect occurs because repetition leads
Speaker 1: to more fluent processing of a statement, and people have
Speaker 1: learned that the experience of processing fluency correlates positively with
Speaker 1: the truth of a statement. So this is sort of
Speaker 1: what we were talking about earlier. It's a heuristic that
Speaker 1: you know, you're more likely to encounter true statements in
Speaker 1: the wild. People learn this through experience, and then they
Speaker 1: use the the the queue of processing fluency to to
Speaker 1: be the judge of whether something is familiar or not.
Speaker 1: And if it's familiar and they get that processing fluency
Speaker 1: bump it's easy to process, then they're more likely to
Speaker 1: believe it's true because that's what has worked for them
Speaker 1: in the past. And if this is true, Uncle Box says,
Speaker 1: I bet I could reverse it with a little bit
Speaker 1: of training, and he does. He's got an experiment where
Speaker 1: with a training phase he actually does three different experiments,
Speaker 1: and essentially what he does is that he trains people
Speaker 1: in a scenario where things that are easier to process,
Speaker 1: either because of being easier to read or because of
Speaker 1: repetition and familiarity. Either way, those things are more core
Speaker 1: related with the thing, with the thing being false, and
Speaker 1: when people get trained in sessions like that, they lose
Speaker 1: the effect. So the good takeaway there is that if
Speaker 1: he's correct, it would probably also mean that your susceptibility
Speaker 1: to the lusory truth effect is dependent on what kind
Speaker 1: of environment you've trained in, and that you could potentially
Speaker 1: untrain yourself on it. But that would be hard to
Speaker 1: do because we all live in this world all the
Speaker 1: time where most of the time people are telling us
Speaker 1: true things. Right, and and again, the brain is still
Speaker 1: going to need all of these shortcuts in order to
Speaker 1: function properly. Yeah, exactly, But you could just be using
Speaker 1: the opposite shortcut, Like if you live in a world
Speaker 1: where people lie to you all the time, Uncle Bock's
Speaker 1: results here would suggest that you would eventually adapt to
Speaker 1: this and you would instead become exactly the opposite. New
Speaker 1: claims you've never heard before would seem more true to you,
Speaker 1: and repeated claims that you're familiar with would seem like
Speaker 1: lies to you. Okay, so there's hope for us after all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, but we can't expect to live in a
Speaker 1: world like that, and we don't want to live in
Speaker 1: a world like like like that, Like you don't want
Speaker 1: to train your brain to live in a world where
Speaker 1: everything is assumed to be a lie. Oh and I
Speaker 1: surely somebody has has considered exploring this in fiction. It
Speaker 1: would be it would be a delicate affair to to
Speaker 1: really put it together and make it work on paper.
Speaker 1: But it's a world that I don't want to live in,
Speaker 1: but I kind of want to visit fictionally. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: i'd go there with you. That that's a good one
Speaker 1: to to come back to. But just as a quick
Speaker 1: note before we close out today, I think this idea
Speaker 1: of processing fluency is a really interesting one. There's tons
Speaker 1: of research on it, Like, uh, there is a study
Speaker 1: I found by Sasha Topalinski from in Cognition and Emotion
Speaker 1: about how processing fluency affects how funny we find jokes
Speaker 1: that apparently, if a joke is easier to process, we've
Speaker 1: got high processing fluency on the joke. We think it's funnier.
Speaker 1: I guess it just like feels good to get it
Speaker 1: without with less effort or something. Uh So, there were
Speaker 1: multiple experiments, but basically here let me let me give
Speaker 1: you a quick preview. Gonna say a word, Robert, Peanuts.
Speaker 1: Do you like that word when you think about it? Peanuts? Peanuts?
Speaker 1: It's pretty good. It's it's not the funniest where it's
Speaker 1: no cheese. But but but I like it. Okay, I
Speaker 1: just said that word. So one example of this type
Speaker 1: of study would be if you prime somebody with significant
Speaker 1: nouns from the punch line of a joke fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: or even up to just one minute before you tell
Speaker 1: them the joke, people find the joke more hilarious. However,
Speaker 1: if you tell them a significant noun from the punch
Speaker 1: line immediately before the joke, they find the joke less funny,
Speaker 1: and the authors think this is probably just or the
Speaker 1: author thinks this is because if you tell them right
Speaker 1: before the joke, it sort of spoils the punch line.
Speaker 1: But knock, knock, who's there? Cash? Cash? Who? No? Thanks?
Speaker 1: I prefer peanuts. Ah See, it works, it's not not
Speaker 1: even but you already established peanuts, so it helped, right.
Speaker 1: I tried to let a minute or so elapse there.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it worked well. It's also complicated
Speaker 1: because we did bring up peanuts and peanut better earlier
Speaker 1: in the episode. I didn't even think about that, but
Speaker 1: this Actually I am not a student of of stand
Speaker 1: up comedy by any stretch of the imagination, but I
Speaker 1: watch enough stand up to see that just that that
Speaker 1: common structural tool that they use where you have the
Speaker 1: call back to a previous joke, and they'll often do
Speaker 1: it right at the end and then it's good night everybody.
Speaker 1: That's the high note. And it it's not even necessarily
Speaker 1: like a call back to their to the funniest moment
Speaker 1: in the bit or the funniest bit in the in
Speaker 1: the stand up performance, but just the fact that they've
Speaker 1: brought your mind back to it. It generates laughter, and
Speaker 1: it's the the moment to end the show. On Yeah.
Speaker 1: The theory is that it's it's very satisfying to have
Speaker 1: a joke that you've where you've been primed for the
Speaker 1: punch line already, because it's so much easier to get
Speaker 1: the punchline quickly and have that experience of familiarity in
Speaker 1: the yaha movement moment, because when you say a word
Speaker 1: and then you say the word again later, the second
Speaker 1: time you hear the word, you've been primed, like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's more fluid. So yeah, I think that may very
Speaker 1: well be going on with callbacks. Another part of the
Speaker 1: same study was that, like the studies we've been seeing before,
Speaker 1: jokes presented in an easy to read font were rated
Speaker 1: as funnier than jokes presented in a really hard to
Speaker 1: read font. That's kind of not surprising, but processing fluency
Speaker 1: it plays into all this stuff, like there is research
Speaker 1: about how opinions that are repeated more often, even just
Speaker 1: by a single person in a group, come to seem
Speaker 1: more prevalent in a group. So you've got ten people
Speaker 1: standing around, and then you've just got Jeff over here,
Speaker 1: and Jeff keeps saying the same opinion over and over again,
Speaker 1: even if you're aware it's just Jeff saying it in
Speaker 1: the end. If he does that, you will think that
Speaker 1: that opinion is more prevalent in the entire group the
Speaker 1: more people hold it. Well, that would make sense. You
Speaker 1: have one person in a group who say continually trashes
Speaker 1: on the movie Aliens. Oh no, why would that happen.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but let's say it it happens. You know,
Speaker 1: I could see where it could reach the point where
Speaker 1: you're kind of like, I don't really know how I
Speaker 1: feel about aliens now, but because I sure do here
Speaker 1: here Jeff uh talking trash about it all the time,
Speaker 1: or you could walk away from it being like, man,
Speaker 1: I don't understand all these people who hate aliens even
Speaker 1: though it's just one person. Yeah, that that seems to
Speaker 1: be something that would go on. Processing fluency also appears
Speaker 1: to have something to do with aesthetic pleasure. There's been
Speaker 1: a lot of research and theory about this that that's
Speaker 1: a major component of what feels aesthetically pleasing to us
Speaker 1: is based on what's easy to process. Another part is
Speaker 1: that processing fluencing fluency apparently affects how credible a face looks.
Speaker 1: Uh So, if are you going to believe somebody, Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out if their face is easier to process,
Speaker 1: especially because you've seen it a bunch of times before,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to believe it. Even if they're not
Speaker 1: famous and they're not somebody you know, they're not like
Speaker 1: somebody you've had experience with that you can you know,
Speaker 1: judge their credibility. Just random faces shown to you in
Speaker 1: different sessions of an experiment. If you've seen them before,
Speaker 1: they're more credible. Of course, that reminds me of various
Speaker 1: experiments over the years involving the believability of people with beards,
Speaker 1: people with facial hair or beards harder to process they have.
Speaker 1: I have not looked into it recently, so I don't
Speaker 1: know if there are any more recent studies that that
Speaker 1: that crack this nut. But but there there have been
Speaker 1: studies that have looked out in the past where they
Speaker 1: make the argument that, yes, an individual with the with
Speaker 1: the beard, you're going to have a little more distrust
Speaker 1: towards them. Well, obviously nobody should trust me. Well, no,
Speaker 1: we trust you because we know you. Joe, Yeah, do
Speaker 1: you really? Do you ever really know someone? Well, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you one thing I know, and that's peanuts stuff.
Speaker 1: You got me. You got me there, you made me
Speaker 1: laugh and my joke didn't make you laugh. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: So we gotta wrap up there. We've gone long here,
Speaker 1: but so we'll be back in the next episode to
Speaker 1: explore more recent findings and some of the ways that
Speaker 1: the illusory truth effect really does matter in our in
Speaker 1: our political and social world. Um. But so main takeaways
Speaker 1: I would say today is that the illusory truth effect
Speaker 1: is real. Exposure and repetition really does change our beliefs.
Speaker 1: The lusory truth effect is small, meaning it doesn't automatically
Speaker 1: overwhelm other criteria in our decision making and judgment. In fact,
Speaker 1: in many cases it appears that whether or not a
Speaker 1: statement is actually true is more important to our judgment
Speaker 1: than whether or not it's repeated or made easier to read,
Speaker 1: or any of these other processing fluency boosts. But on average,
Speaker 1: over lots of repetitions, it's easy to see how this
Speaker 1: could have a big effect, especially when you bring it
Speaker 1: back to propaganda purposes on things we believe as a society,
Speaker 1: things that shift voting patterns in small but significant ways
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Yeah, that's the key. That it's
Speaker 1: not occurring within a vacuum. It's uh, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: affecting and being affected by all these other um mental
Speaker 1: processes and UH and factors that are affecting our decision
Speaker 1: making and worldview totally. But we will get more into
Speaker 1: that in our next episode. In the meantime, be sure
Speaker 1: to check out all the episodes of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That is the mothership. That is where you will find everything,
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