Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the Old Vault. This episode originally
Speaker 1: aired July, and this was part one of our discussion
Speaker 1: of the illusory truth effect, one of the many biases
Speaker 1: that that, unfortunately affects all of our brains and makes
Speaker 1: it harder for us to know what's true. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is one that's, uh, you know, this is gonna shake
Speaker 1: some of your your foundation stones. I think you know,
Speaker 1: this one's gonna make you rethink the way you interact
Speaker 1: with with the world and how you interact with truth. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's maybe a harrowing journey at times, but
Speaker 1: I think you're gonna emerge on the other end stronger.
Speaker 1: And Part two will come a week from today. Your today,
Speaker 1: not our today, as we record this. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
Speaker 1: you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In today, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about one of our favorite subjects, our
Speaker 1: tendency to believe things that aren't true now, Robert, I
Speaker 1: wonder is there a false factoid or claim that you
Speaker 1: just always find yourself recalling as true even though you've
Speaker 1: checked it before and discovered it to be false in
Speaker 1: the past. Yeah, this is an interesting question because I
Speaker 1: feel like there are things that come up in research
Speaker 1: all the time, certainly key things over the years. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, as we research and riot different topics where
Speaker 1: I have to correct on, you know, where I think
Speaker 1: I knew something and then I'm like, oh, well that's
Speaker 1: that's actually now that actually do the research, it's not
Speaker 1: not a not a fact. And then then you know,
Speaker 1: the same goes for false beliefs, that beliefs that they
Speaker 1: creep in the sort of Mandela fact type of scenario.
Speaker 1: For instance, there was a time when I thought Gene
Speaker 1: Wilder was dead prior to his actual death, and then
Speaker 1: as he actually dead now he is actual really dead now.
Speaker 1: So I thought he was dead before he was dead
Speaker 1: exactly because and I think it was just a combination
Speaker 1: of he was not as active anymore, and I wasn't
Speaker 1: really keeping up with the Gene Wilder filmography and like
Speaker 1: current events related to Gene Wilder, and something maybe I
Speaker 1: picked up on some news piece at some point, and
Speaker 1: somehow he got clicked to the dead category. And then
Speaker 1: when I found out he was alive, it was it
Speaker 1: was really like he came back to life. And I
Speaker 1: had the same thing happened literally just the other day
Speaker 1: with a standout comedian, Larry Miller. I don't think I
Speaker 1: remember who that is. Oh. He he had to kind
Speaker 1: of you know, dry observational comedy he had. I think
Speaker 1: he still acts, but he would show up on say
Speaker 1: night Chord. I think, oh, wait a minute, is seeing
Speaker 1: some Christopher guest movies. He may have been, Yeah, but
Speaker 1: for some reason years ago, I got into my head
Speaker 1: that he had passed away, and so occasionally I would
Speaker 1: think of Larry Miller and was like, oh, yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember Larry Miller. Too bad he passed. And then I
Speaker 1: actually looked him up the other day and it turns
Speaker 1: out he was not passed away. He's still very much
Speaker 1: alive and active. And I was just living in this
Speaker 1: fantasy world of dead and 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
Speaker 1: kid that vitamin C supplements will ward off colds. That
Speaker 1: is not experimentally proven. That that is like not a
Speaker 1: finding of science. And yet I just always if I
Speaker 1: haven't 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 going to go and take it
Speaker 1: just in case, because it's it's vitamin C. You know,
Speaker 1: what's the what's what's the harm there? It's kind of
Speaker 1: like believing in God just in cases that he exists,
Speaker 1: believing in vitamins. Yeah, but then you end up with
Speaker 1: like a weird sort of vitamin tentacle going out of
Speaker 1: your neck. And you didn't see that come digit, that's
Speaker 1: fake news. The Joe vidamin C will not cause a
Speaker 1: tentacle to grow out of your neck. But now you've
Speaker 1: heard it, it's true. Um. You know, I feel like
Speaker 1: there are things that have popped up where where I'll think, well,
Speaker 1: I've always heard X, but I've never actually looked it up. UM,
Speaker 1: And and then that's where the problem seeps in, you know,
Speaker 1: where I just I think I know something, but I'm
Speaker 1: not sure, but I don't care enough to actually investigate. UM.
Speaker 1: There is one possible example that that comes up, and
Speaker 1: that is there was this, of course, the idea that
Speaker 1: George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. He 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 butter 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: the is this is false. He did not invent peanut
Speaker 1: better he did, but he did do stuff with peanuts,
Speaker 1: could do stuff with peanuts, but not peanut butter. Okay.
Speaker 1: You know a huge place where you can see false
Speaker 1: beliefs persisting, UM is in people's beliefs about sort of
Speaker 1: like political facts or sociological data. A very very common
Speaker 1: one is people's beliefs about crime. I think it's because
Speaker 1: like crime is one of those like sensational types of
Speaker 1: subjects and makes people think about violence, images of blood
Speaker 1: they see on the news and stuff like that. You know,
Speaker 1: poll conducted by Pew in the fall of get this
Speaker 1: fifty seven percent, So a majority of people who had
Speaker 1: voted or planned to vote in sixteen said that crime
Speaker 1: had gotten worse in the United States since two thousand
Speaker 1: eight by every objective measure. Exactly, the opposite is true.
Speaker 1: That's just not true. FBI statistics, based off of like
Speaker 1: nationwide police reports, found that violent cry time and property
Speaker 1: crime in the United States fell nineteen percent and twenty
Speaker 1: three percent, respectively between two thousand eight and and so
Speaker 1: you think, okay, well, maybe that if that's just police reports,
Speaker 1: maybe fewer people are reporting crimes to the police, right,
Speaker 1: But also the U. S. Department of Justice Bureau of
Speaker 1: Justice Statistics does direct annual surveys of more than ninety
Speaker 1: thou households to see about rates of crime that might
Speaker 1: not be reported to police. And quote the b j
Speaker 1: S state to show that violent crime and property crime
Speaker 1: rates fell twenty six percent and twenty two percent, respectively,
Speaker 1: between two thousand eight and so a majority of people
Speaker 1: are believing something that by every measure we know, is
Speaker 1: not true. Crime has gone down, and yet a majority
Speaker 1: of people believe it has gone up. And it's not
Speaker 1: hard to see why that might be true when you
Speaker 1: consider like the political messaging of certain politicians. It's also
Speaker 1: you could also, of course think about just people negativity bias, right,
Speaker 1: the tendency to believe things are worse than they are
Speaker 1: in the broad sense or mean world syndrome looking at
Speaker 1: dangerous stuff happening on the news and thus having an
Speaker 1: overrepresentation of it in your mind. But I think we
Speaker 1: would be 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
Speaker 1: roof right, And and to your point, we can look
Speaker 1: to statistics on this. This is not something that is uh.
Speaker 1: That is just you know, in the ether, we have
Speaker 1: hard data. It's not a matter of opinion. It's just
Speaker 1: like every measure we have says that's not correct. But
Speaker 1: what about other beliefs. I mean that that's certainly not
Speaker 1: in isolation. There are lots of cases where there are
Speaker 1: widespread beliefs in things that are just simply factually not true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll run through a few here that that range and topic.
Speaker 1: For instance, here's a nice science related when to kick
Speaker 1: off with. In a two thousand fifteen Pew survey, only
Speaker 1: thirty percent of Americans knew that water boils at all
Speaker 1: lower temperature at higher altitudes. Thirty nine percent said it
Speaker 1: would boil at the same temperature in Denver in l A,
Speaker 1: again Denver being at a far higher altitude, and had
Speaker 1: it reversed. So the majority, something like two thirds of
Speaker 1: people were just flat wrong yes and uh yeah. And
Speaker 1: to put that in perspective with another science fact, most
Speaker 1: Americans in this two thousand fifteen survey correctly identified the
Speaker 1: Earth's inner layer, the core, as its hottest part, and
Speaker 1: nearly as many two knew that uranium was needed to
Speaker 1: make nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Well, should we be
Speaker 1: comforted by the fact that that's what people know? I don't, like,
Speaker 1: they don't know much about water, but they know about
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons. Well, I mean, on one hand, nuclear weapons
Speaker 1: was is and was more in the news. Uh, And
Speaker 1: then on the other hand, like the the inside of
Speaker 1: the earth is more engaging and and also completely on politicize. Uh, well,
Speaker 1: well water is not politically boiling point of water is
Speaker 1: not politicized. But it's also not very sexy. I guess
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's one of those things where unless
Speaker 1: you're actively moving from low to high altitudes or you know,
Speaker 1: living part of your time and dinner from part of
Speaker 1: your time in l A, I guess it's it's very
Speaker 1: possible to live your entire life without really having any
Speaker 1: real world experience with the difference. Uh though, I do
Speaker 1: feel 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 that you know one of the ones you've
Speaker 1: got here that that has come up many times in
Speaker 1: my life. It's come up enough that I know the
Speaker 1: right answer now. But the misconception that you can see
Speaker 1: the Great Wall of China from space, Oh yeah, this
Speaker 1: is one that I have to admit. I think I
Speaker 1: used to adhere to again without really referencing it, because
Speaker 1: it just it had that kind of truthiness to it, right,
Speaker 1: and you want it to be to be real. The
Speaker 1: idea that that this this epic structure aided Uh, you
Speaker 1: know long Ago is visible from space, but it's actually
Speaker 1: been been disproven multiple times. It's it's only visible from
Speaker 1: low orbit under very ideal conditions, and it's not visible
Speaker 1: from the Moon at all. Because that's another version of
Speaker 1: it that it's that that the Great Wall of China
Speaker 1: can be seen from the moon. Yeah, I guess there
Speaker 1: are nuances to the word visible. What's what I mean?
Speaker 1: But in the normal sense that you would mean it's
Speaker 1: not visible from space. Correct. Now a two thousand sixteen
Speaker 1: you gov poll, this was this is a UK group.
Speaker 1: They looked at how belief in pizza gate that thing, Yeah,
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 rings 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, sevent of polled Clinton
Speaker 1: voters believed that that this was the case, this was
Speaker 1: a reality, and of Trump voters did um. And then
Speaker 1: there's another classic they looked out to to put this
Speaker 1: in perspective, the idea that President Barack Obama was born
Speaker 1: in Kenya. Kind of alarmingly enough, across both groups of voters,
Speaker 1: both the Clinton voters and the Trump voters, they found
Speaker 1: thirty six percent believed it, despite the fact that that too,
Speaker 1: has been debunked time and time again. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's crazy that these types of beliefs can catch on
Speaker 1: so well, especially like we we understand very well the
Speaker 1: way that political ideology and tribal thinking affects the way
Speaker 1: we form opinions. Obviously, our our opinions are deeply informed
Speaker 1: by what people we view as are in group believe,
Speaker 1: and so we want to be in line with the
Speaker 1: in group and and stuff like that. But you also
Speaker 1: can't really ignore the fact that these are things that
Speaker 1: if you pay attention to certain sources, you're going to
Speaker 1: be hearing over and over and over again. And what
Speaker 1: effect that might have because it's you know, widely accepted
Speaker 1: fulk wisdom that if you repeat a lie enough, people
Speaker 1: start to believe that it's the truth. Right, That's one
Speaker 1: of the things. I mean, I don't know, you've said
Speaker 1: it enough times that I'm already convinced exactly, I mean
Speaker 1: almost going along with this. Uh. There's a quote that
Speaker 1: often gets sourced to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Gebbles. 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 wrote 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 with Hitler though. If if Hitler
Speaker 1: was good at anything, it was getting lots of people
Speaker 1: to believe lies. Certainly, so I think, because this is
Speaker 1: such an important issue. And because widespread misconceptions are so common,
Speaker 1: and because they can, in fact, especially in some political circumstances,
Speaker 1: be so destructive, And because the repetition of lies and
Speaker 1: false statements in in at every scale of existence, you know,
Speaker 1: in in mass media and in our personal private lives,
Speaker 1: is so common, I think it's worth looking at the
Speaker 1: actual empirical case. Is this true, the idea that repeating
Speaker 1: statements over and over does that actually change what we believe.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things that you know, it sounds
Speaker 1: so common sensical, you just assume it's true. But according
Speaker 1: to the logic we're using now, those are exactly the
Speaker 1: kinds of statements that maybe we should be careful about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think this is an important important topic for
Speaker 1: for everybody. I don't care who you voted for in
Speaker 1: any previous elections or which political party in your given
Speaker 1: system that you adhere to. I think if you're listening
Speaker 1: to this show especially, you want to think for yourself.
Speaker 1: You want to reduce the amount of manipulation that's going
Speaker 1: on with your your own view of reality. And and
Speaker 1: and that's what we're going to discuss here today. We're
Speaker 1: gonna discuss the degree to which false information can manipulate
Speaker 1: our view of reality and ultimately, what are some of
Speaker 1: the things we can do to to hold onto our
Speaker 1: our our individuality and all of this exactly. So this
Speaker 1: is going to be the first of a two part
Speaker 1: episode where we explore the liar's best trick, the question
Speaker 1: of repetition and exposure in forming our beliefs and changing
Speaker 1: our attitudes. So that's going to be the jumping off
Speaker 1: point for today's episode. Does exposure and repetition is hearing
Speaker 1: a claim and hearing it repeated actually have the power
Speaker 1: to change our beliefs? Or is that just unverified folk wisdom? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And and of course it goes it goes well beyond politics.
Speaker 1: It also gets into marketing. You know, we've we've touched
Speaker 1: on the manipulative nature of marketing and advertisement on the
Speaker 1: show before, and it's always one of the things you
Speaker 1: always come back to. It's always about messaging, right, Like
Speaker 1: what is the message of the product? What's the message
Speaker 1: of the ad campaign? And how they just continue to
Speaker 1: hammer that home. Why do brands have slogans? Yeah? Why
Speaker 1: don't they just tell you a positive message about the
Speaker 1: brand that's different every time? Why do they tell you
Speaker 1: the same message in the same words in every commercial. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why did those fabulous horror trailers from the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: say the name of the film eighteen times, don't go
Speaker 1: in the basement, don't go in the basement, No one, no,
Speaker 1: just seventeen will be admitted. Yeah, it's all. It's all
Speaker 1: kind of part of the same situation. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break and when we
Speaker 1: get back, we will dive into the research in the
Speaker 1: history of psychology about repetition and exposure. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: All right, 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: and it was by Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Topino,
Speaker 1: and it was called Frequency and the Conference of Referential
Speaker 1: Validity in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior,
Speaker 1: And that was as I said in nineteen seven. So
Speaker 1: the authors start out in the study by talking about
Speaker 1: how most studies of memory that take place in the
Speaker 1: lab involved useless or meaningless information units. So researchers, for example,
Speaker 1: might try to see how well subjects remember a phrase
Speaker 1: like I just made this up. The purple donkey was
Speaker 1: made of soft spoken muscular elves, Like, can you remember
Speaker 1: that word for word? The purple donkey was made by
Speaker 1: muscular elves. Now, now you're close, not made of Yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes a lot more sense to say made by wow.
Speaker 1: But I see, I've already missed up the origin story
Speaker 1: of the purple donkey. Statements like this have no importance
Speaker 1: in the real world, and part of what they were
Speaker 1: talking about is that we're testing for memory and things
Speaker 1: that don't have any validity to reality. Um. So the
Speaker 1: authors write that they're curious about what kind of processing
Speaker 1: subjects do with information units that might have validity in
Speaker 1: the real world. For example, factual statements like quote, the
Speaker 1: total population of Greenland is about fifty thou which at
Speaker 1: 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,
Speaker 1: but I would agree based on I'll be a limited
Speaker 1: amount of of information that I've I've read and viewed
Speaker 1: about Greenland. You know, you typically, in my experience, Greenland
Speaker 1: shows up in nature documentaries, and of course you're going
Speaker 1: to see rather barren uh locations in those films. Well,
Speaker 1: greenlanders out there in the audience. Let us know if
Speaker 1: you're listening, what's life like up there in Greenland. I'm
Speaker 1: interested now. But anyway back, So, yeah, population of Greenland
Speaker 1: at the times about fifty and so statements like this
Speaker 1: both refer to something that could be true or false
Speaker 1: in the real world, and there are also things that
Speaker 1: people are probably uncertain about, like do you know what
Speaker 1: the actual population of Greenland is? I didn't know before
Speaker 1: I looked it up, And so we know that the
Speaker 1: statement is either true or false, but we aren't sure
Speaker 1: whether it's true or false. And of course, to go
Speaker 1: back to a previous episode, you're kind of anchoring my
Speaker 1: expectations by throwing out without any population data in my
Speaker 1: head about Greenland, like that's suddenly all I have to
Speaker 1: go on, Oh yeah, that's interesting. Also, so like it
Speaker 1: could be three thousand or it could be like a million,
Speaker 1: and either you're sort of moving your guests range toward fifty.
Speaker 1: So the thing they point out is, even though most
Speaker 1: people don't know what the population of Greenland is, we're
Speaker 1: often willing, into some extent able to make guesses as
Speaker 1: to whether statements like this are true. So where does
Speaker 1: this semantic knowledge come from? When we feel like we
Speaker 1: have knowledge to offer a guess about what the population
Speaker 1: of Greenland is even when we don't really know what
Speaker 1: is that what allows us to judge these questions? And
Speaker 1: the authors note that frequency is a really powerful variable
Speaker 1: in all kinds of judgments we make about the world.
Speaker 1: So they hypothesize that quote frequency might also serve as
Speaker 1: the major access route that plausible statements have into our
Speaker 1: pool of general knowledge. So the idea is that we
Speaker 1: build our knowledge base based on how frequently we are
Speaker 1: exposed to ideas. You hear an idea a lot, and
Speaker 1: that gets reinforced in the knowledge base. You've never heard
Speaker 1: an idea before, or you don't hear it a lot,
Speaker 1: it doesn't get reinforced, and it doesn't exist in the
Speaker 1: knowledge base. So here's the experimental part. Researchers came up
Speaker 1: with a list of a hundred and forty true statements
Speaker 1: and false statements, crafted so they all sound plausible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they could be true, you know, the average person would
Speaker 1: be unsure whether or not they're true. And the statements
Speaker 1: were on all kinds of subjects like geography, arts and literature, history, sports,
Speaker 1: current events science. A few examples of true statements included
Speaker 1: things like Cairo, Egypt has a larger population than Chicago, Illinois,
Speaker 1: and French horn players get cash bonuses to stay in
Speaker 1: the U. S. Arm True. Well, i'd see it. I
Speaker 1: should have joined the army after all. See, I was
Speaker 1: a french horn player really in high school. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't know that. What's it like playing the french horn.
Speaker 1: It's just, you know, there's a lot of spit and
Speaker 1: a lot of shoving your hand up horns. That's it.
Speaker 1: Otherwise it's like playing a trumpet. Now. See I actually
Speaker 1: played trumpet, and it's a lot less fun than what
Speaker 1: you're describing. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. There is
Speaker 1: an elegance to the way you hold it, and you again,
Speaker 1: you have your hand in the inside the horn. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Being a trumpet player to me always felt
Speaker 1: like being a person who's complaining at full volume. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there is. There's more of an outward stance with the trumpet, right,
Speaker 1: you're blasting outward, But in the French horn, you it's
Speaker 1: it's more like you're playing music into yourself. That's quite beautiful,
Speaker 1: more beautiful than any music I 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 ninety
Speaker 1: seven it was actually ninety nine. Or the copy bara
Speaker 1: is the largest of the marsupials. That's not true. The
Speaker 1: largest marcipial is the red kangaroo. The largest known in
Speaker 1: the fossil record is this thing called the extinct dip protodon.
Speaker 1: Now that in the capy bar is a rodent, right,
Speaker 1: I only is the capy bar and marsupial. I didn't
Speaker 1: even look it up. I only know that because I
Speaker 1: go to a lot of zoos these days. But it
Speaker 1: is a mammal, it's a it's a rodent. It is
Speaker 1: a mammal, and it is a rodent, not a marsupial. Well,
Speaker 1: there we go. So it's wrong in multiple ways. So
Speaker 1: you got this big list that came up with of
Speaker 1: true and false statements, and all of them should sound
Speaker 1: plausible to the average person, But most people are not
Speaker 1: going to be likely to know for sure whether they're
Speaker 1: true unless they just happened to have some special random
Speaker 1: knowledge 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 for the
Speaker 1: very first time covered around, you know, like four or
Speaker 1: four point one across all three sessions. That would correspond
Speaker 1: to people saying they're uncertain. I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: know whether French horn players get a cash bone us
Speaker 1: for staying in the army and playing into the self
Speaker 1: and sticking the hand up the horn. But in the
Speaker 1: second session there repeated false statements jumped up from about
Speaker 1: four point over four point one to about four point five,
Speaker 1: and then in the third session up again to about
Speaker 1: four point seven. And we only saw what happened with
Speaker 1: two sessions. Who knows what have happened what might have
Speaker 1: happened if you had continued adding more sessions. So just
Speaker 1: seeing a statement more than once appeared to make it
Speaker 1: more believable even though it wasn't true. And the pattern
Speaker 1: was roughly the same for true statements, which isn't all
Speaker 1: that surprising since the experiment was based on, you know,
Speaker 1: statements that people didn't know whether they were true or
Speaker 1: false to begin with. So, the authors wrote in conclusion, quote,
Speaker 1: the present research has demonstrated that the repetition of a
Speaker 1: plausible statement increases a person's belief in the referential validity
Speaker 1: or truth of that statement. I don't know why they
Speaker 1: had to say referential validity. They could have just said truth.
Speaker 1: And that's that's some science writing for you. Uh, in
Speaker 1: the truth of that statement. And indeed, the present experiment
Speaker 1: appears to lend empirical support to the idea that quote,
Speaker 1: if people are told something often enough, they'll believe it.
Speaker 1: Uh so, so yeah, this is this is the first
Speaker 1: real study to find this and a few other things
Speaker 1: the authors thought were worth considering. Uh. The fact that
Speaker 1: this effect was displayed in statements from a big broad
Speaker 1: pool of different types of subject matter suggests this is
Speaker 1: not extremely context dependent. Right, It's not just going to
Speaker 1: be political beliefs that are subject to this. It seems
Speaker 1: to be all different kinds of statements in all different
Speaker 1: kinds of domains. Another thing they noted was that the
Speaker 1: effect was present for true statements and false statements. Either way,
Speaker 1: if students saw the claims more often, they believed them
Speaker 1: with greater confidence. But another takeaway is that the effect
Speaker 1: is not huge for false statements. Three exposures was roughly
Speaker 1: enough to get you from I'm uncertain to it's possibly true.
Speaker 1: But as we mentioned before, how many this is just
Speaker 1: two or three sessions right right? Who knows what what
Speaker 1: would have happened if maybe you had done this more
Speaker 1: times in a row, or if there had been other
Speaker 1: factors affecting whether people were likely to believe these things
Speaker 1: to begin with, say if they had valences to the
Speaker 1: person's political identity or something like that. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: as we're researching this into and discussing it, I couldn't
Speaker 1: help but think of notable examples of uh false stories
Speaker 1: about generally like like celebrities from the past. And I'm
Speaker 1: not going to mention any of them specifically. Why not, Well,
Speaker 1: because you know they all tend to be a bit crude.
Speaker 1: There there are several of them about like carrying down
Speaker 1: various sort of you know, pretty boy rockers or actors
Speaker 1: from the past, uh in in the in. The interesting
Speaker 1: thing about him is these are generally like pre internet
Speaker 1: um stories that had to circulate the word of mouth
Speaker 1: or I think in one case there was talk of
Speaker 1: like a whole bunch of of facts is going out
Speaker 1: in Hollywood where someone was just basically just wanted to
Speaker 1: take somebody down because they didn't like them. I remember,
Speaker 1: I think, like ninth grade here is starting to hear
Speaker 1: this bizarre story about rich your gear. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: the main one I'm thinking of. And I think it
Speaker 1: basically comes down to Richard Geary's is a handsome, successful
Speaker 1: guy and and for a lot of people, you want
Speaker 1: to like really you know, and knock him down or
Speaker 1: not you Yeah, and uh, and so when you encounter
Speaker 1: a bit of slander or libel like that, or uh,
Speaker 1: just a ridiculous story, you're going to be more inclined
Speaker 1: to believe it if you kind of want it to
Speaker 1: be true, right or if you or you're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: let screw that guy. I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead
Speaker 1: and believe this, or even if I don't believe it,
Speaker 1: I'm going to pass it on. But either way, whether
Speaker 1: or not you're predisposed to believe it's true, it looks
Speaker 1: like this initial study at least provides evidence that you
Speaker 1: would be more disposed to believe it's true in either case. Like,
Speaker 1: so whatever you're starting point is it's gonna nudge you up,
Speaker 1: like if nothing else becomes word association, Like if you're
Speaker 1: not really a fan, say Richard Gear's work, uh, and
Speaker 1: you can't name your your favorite Richard Gear film off
Speaker 1: the top of your head, that might be the primary
Speaker 1: keyword that pops up when you hear his name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be. Uh. Yeah. So so this bizarre effect
Speaker 1: that we're talking about where hearing a fact repeated, even
Speaker 1: if you've got no good reason to believe it's true,
Speaker 1: just hearing it repeated causes you to be more likely
Speaker 1: to believe it. This came to be known first as
Speaker 1: the truth effect, and then later on probably a better
Speaker 1: title was the illusory truth effect. I think we should
Speaker 1: use the second one because otherwise that makes it sound true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just makes it sound like yeah, if you if
Speaker 1: you repeat something, then it is then it is true.
Speaker 1: There is no question anymore. So. The basic version of
Speaker 1: the illusory truth effect is quote. People are more likely
Speaker 1: to judge repeated statements as true compared to new statements,
Speaker 1: And another way of putting it is that all other
Speaker 1: things being equal, you're more likely to believe a claim
Speaker 1: if you've heard it before than one you haven't heard before,
Speaker 1: and the more times you you're the claim, the more
Speaker 1: likely you are to believe it. But so far we've
Speaker 1: just talked about one study, right, this this one nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven study, uh what we can call it the
Speaker 1: Star Wars study. If you want the Star Wars study here.
Speaker 1: It's a fairly small sample, just one study. If you
Speaker 1: want to be skeptical and rigorous, maybe especially because this
Speaker 1: backs up ful quisdom, which is always something you should
Speaker 1: be careful about. We should see if the effect has
Speaker 1: been replicated by other researchers, and boy, howdy it has.
Speaker 1: That's right. This next one comes to us from nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Learning and Memory,
Speaker 1: the work of Frederick T. Bacon. Yeah, this was called
Speaker 1: the Credibility of repeated Statements memory for trivia. So Bacon
Speaker 1: performed he was trying to replicate this this effect. He
Speaker 1: performed additional experiments to test the previous team's conclusions and
Speaker 1: add some nuance. So his first experiment, you got ninety
Speaker 1: eight undergrads and they had two sessions in which they
Speaker 1: were asked to rate sentences as true or false, with
Speaker 1: three weeks between the two Sessions, and Bacon found that
Speaker 1: the repetition illusory truth effect was modulated by whether the
Speaker 1: subjects consciously believed that a sentence had been repeated. That is,
Speaker 1: if they remembered that they had seen the sentence last time,
Speaker 1: they were more inclined to believe it. If they believed
Speaker 1: they were seeing a sentence for the first time, they
Speaker 1: were less likely to believe it. And this was true
Speaker 1: regardless of the statements themselves. I can't help but think
Speaker 1: of our modern version of this with Facebook feed right,
Speaker 1: because you're inevitably, if you're your Facebook user, or perhaps
Speaker 1: if you're a Twitter user or some other social media
Speaker 1: you're you're scrolling down right and there are a lot
Speaker 1: of sentences coming at you. Some you just kind of
Speaker 1: read in passing. So maybe you don't read at all.
Speaker 1: But are you actually stopping to really think about what
Speaker 1: a particular headline or you know, or paragraph is saying
Speaker 1: or is it just kind of scrolling in the background
Speaker 1: of your mind. Yeah, And the result of this one
Speaker 1: experiment here would seem to indicate if it has validity,
Speaker 1: it would mean the ones you stop and pay attention
Speaker 1: to you 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 something news.
Speaker 1: This has been totally debunked. Um, you can look it
Speaker 1: up on Snopes, etcetera. And that's still not going to
Speaker 1: completely disarm the piece that you're sharing. Well, we will
Speaker 1: talk so I would say, yes, we will talk more
Speaker 1: about that in the second episode where this kind of
Speaker 1: thing comes into conflict with real world beliefs. And just
Speaker 1: to be clear, I made up that zebra thing that
Speaker 1: that wasn't from the vacant study. I thought that would
Speaker 1: be clear. But that's number one, not true. Number two,
Speaker 1: as far as I know, not one of the examples.
Speaker 1: Bacon used, Right, Well, I'm sorry you had to drag
Speaker 1: Zebras into all this. Joe. Well, you know, I like
Speaker 1: the idea of a weaponized tongue that's gonna go beyond
Speaker 1: the X Men. Surely that exists in reality. Well yes,
Speaker 1: but but not with Zebras. No. No, I guess that's
Speaker 1: amphibians and stuff. Okay, okay, So back to the study,
Speaker 1: so Bacon says in his abstract quote. It was further
Speaker 1: determined that statements that contradicted early ones were rated as
Speaker 1: relatively true if misclassified as repetitions, but that statements judged
Speaker 1: to be changed were rated as relatively false. So even
Speaker 1: if you remember that you saw something before, you're more
Speaker 1: likely to believe it's true. It's kind of odd. That
Speaker 1: makes you wonder, what is the initial uh, what's the
Speaker 1: initial stimulus that caused you to misremember that you had
Speaker 1: seen it before. Well, as we've discussed on the show before,
Speaker 1: I mean, there are multiple ways that false memories can
Speaker 1: be can be encoded. Oh yeah, absolutely. And so Bacon
Speaker 1: concludes that basically, people are predisposed to believe statements that
Speaker 1: affirm existing knowledge and to disbelieve statements that contradict existing knowledge.
Speaker 1: That's not all that unusual, right, But but it's specifically
Speaker 1: the repetition effect that seems to be playing a role here.
Speaker 1: Let's take a look at another study. How about nine
Speaker 1: two Marian Schwartz Repetition and Rated Truth Value of Statements
Speaker 1: from the American Journal of Psychology. So Schwartz here has
Speaker 1: conducted two experiments on what psychologists were by this time
Speaker 1: calling the truth effect what we're calling the illusory truth
Speaker 1: effect UM. So, experiment one, you get a group of
Speaker 1: subject and they rate claims on a seven point truth
Speaker 1: value scale, just like in the first study, the star
Speaker 1: Wars study, the seventy seven study, UM and a different
Speaker 1: group of subjects rated the same statements on a seven
Speaker 1: point scale of how familiar they were with the statements
Speaker 1: before the experiment started. How familiar are you with this
Speaker 1: repetition increased both ratings. So both pre experimental familiarity as
Speaker 1: well as the perceived truth value. They both went up
Speaker 1: when people saw them more than once. That's not surprising.
Speaker 1: Again the replication, and then also the fact that you
Speaker 1: have seen something before, we'll tend to make you more
Speaker 1: familiar with it. Then you've got another experiment here. Second
Speaker 1: one replicated the illusory truth effect. Again found that it
Speaker 1: didn't matter whether you mixed up repeated statements that people
Speaker 1: had seen before with new statements or only showed them
Speaker 1: repeated statements. 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 one 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 page 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 when 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.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I don't know. So this is what we
Speaker 1: should explore for the rest of the episode. I think,
Speaker 1: why should repeatedly exposing ourselves to the same information increase
Speaker 1: our confidence in it? If we didn't have good reasons
Speaker 1: to believe it the first time. It's clear that this
Speaker 1: is what's happening, But why does it happen this way?
Speaker 1: All right, we'll take one more break and when we
Speaker 1: come back, we'll we'll jump into this. Thank alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So we're asking this question of why repeatedly exposing ourselves
Speaker 1: to the same information would increase our confidence if we
Speaker 1: didn't 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've touched on
Speaker 1: this before, that that we're all social animals. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I've I've wondered if there this is a byproduct of
Speaker 1: the drive to fit in with a given group or tribe,
Speaker 1: that there's ultimately a survival advantage and getting along with
Speaker 1: the group, and so does that bleed over into highly
Speaker 1: repeated or highly circulated lies or untruths. So basically like
Speaker 1: if there is a lie going around in the group.
Speaker 1: You'll get along with the group better if you just
Speaker 1: accept the lie. Yeah, And I'm not you know, certainly
Speaker 1: after looking at more of the research, I'm not arguing
Speaker 1: that that is the core um mechanism involved here. This
Speaker 1: is worth exploring that. But but I but I do
Speaker 1: like wonder to what extent that is that's playing a role.
Speaker 1: Because you we we all have our our groups that
Speaker 1: we are involved in, our our our friends, our family,
Speaker 1: or our work groups, our social media groups are are
Speaker 1: sort of echo chambers that we find online. And uh,
Speaker 1: does it make you more susceptible to the lie just
Speaker 1: because there is this this ingrained need to fit in
Speaker 1: with that group too, to share the same values, and
Speaker 1: to put it on in the prehistoric framework, to to
Speaker 1: continue to have access to the fire and the and
Speaker 1: the feast. Yeah, I think I think that's a possibility
Speaker 1: 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 Dinnett. Daniel Dinnett, all right, so they approached
Speaker 1: the following. I guess you could call it a paradox
Speaker 1: in the paper. Given that we evolve to thrive in
Speaker 1: a fact based world, what other kind of world could
Speaker 1: there exactly? Yeah, I mean, we we're dealing with with
Speaker 1: actual reality here. But but given that we've evolved to
Speaker 1: thrive in this world, shouldn't true beliefs be adaptive and
Speaker 1: misbeliefs be maladaptive. It's clear that in many cases, probably
Speaker 1: most cases, that is the way things are. Right. Believing
Speaker 1: that you are able to fly off the edge of
Speaker 1: a cliff is not good for you. Believing that polar
Speaker 1: bears want to cuddle with you is not advantageous. Holding
Speaker 1: 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've reached 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: mostly true things, unless there are cases where believing something
Speaker 1: that's false outweighs the negative the drawbacks essentially. So here here,
Speaker 1: here's what they wrote. Quote on this assumption, our beliefs
Speaker 1: about the world are essentially tools that enable us to
Speaker 1: act effectively in the world. Moreover, to be reliable, such
Speaker 1: tools must be produced in us, it is assumed by
Speaker 1: systems designed by evolution to be truth aiming and hence
Speaker 1: barring miracles, These systems must be designed to generate grounded beliefs.
Speaker 1: A system for generating ungrounded but mostly true beliefs would
Speaker 1: be an oracle, as impossible as a perpetual motion machine.
Speaker 1: I like that. Yeah, So there's got to be like
Speaker 1: a grounding procedure through which we can discover true beliefs
Speaker 1: if we're going to have them. Otherwise we're just talking
Speaker 1: about magic. But we have to account for these varying
Speaker 1: levels of misbelief and self deception in the human experience.
Speaker 1: They write, If evolution has designed us to appraise the
Speaker 1: world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we
Speaker 1: to account for the routine exceptions to this rule instances
Speaker 1: of misbelief? Most of us, at times believe oppositions that
Speaker 1: end up being disproved. Many of us produce beliefs that
Speaker 1: others consider obviously false to begin with, and some of
Speaker 1: his form beliefs that are not just manifestly but bizarrely false.
Speaker 1: How can this be? Are all these misbeliefs just accidents,
Speaker 1: incidences of pathology or breakdown or at best undesirable but
Speaker 1: tolerable byproducts. Might some of them contrat the default presumption
Speaker 1: be adaptive in and of themselves. I like this distinction
Speaker 1: they're making. I think this is actually useful. So they're
Speaker 1: breaking misbeliefs down into two basic kinds of categories, right
Speaker 1: right that they're talking about. One those resulting from a
Speaker 1: breakdown in the normal functioning of the belief formation system.
Speaker 1: This would be delusions malfunctions, so things like face blindness
Speaker 1: or or catard syndrome. Okay, this is when the brain
Speaker 1: is creating incorrect beliefs because it's not working right, it's
Speaker 1: not doing what it's supposed to be doing. But then
Speaker 1: the second category are those that are arising in the
Speaker 1: normal course of that system's operations, So beliefs based on
Speaker 1: incomplete or inaccurate information. These would be This would be
Speaker 1: a case of manufacture. And we'll get into examples of
Speaker 1: 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 oven that doesn't keep time at all. You can't
Speaker 1: expect the toaster of and to keep time unless it's
Speaker 1: got a time right. Well, yes, so that's true. Yes,
Speaker 1: I would have said a purple donkey built by muscular
Speaker 1: elves that doesn't keep because you wouldn't even expect that's true?
Speaker 1: Yes now, But but it gets more complicated when you
Speaker 1: go into 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, even though the heart transplant could save the patient,
Speaker 1: will save the patients. So it seems like in order
Speaker 1: to understand this, you almost have to understand the context, right, right,
Speaker 1: They say that they invoked the work of Ruth Garrett Milliken,
Speaker 1: who in saying that we can't look to an organ's
Speaker 1: current properties or disposition, we have to look to its history.
Speaker 1: That makes sense to me. Organ transplants, of course, are
Speaker 1: not part of our evolutionary history. So this is just
Speaker 1: the body functioning normally in rejecting the invader heart. Right.
Speaker 1: The body is not malfunctioning, is doing what it's supposed
Speaker 1: to do. We're just throwing a situation at it that
Speaker 1: it's not prepared to deal with. Yeah, so that brings
Speaker 1: us to the more human examples, you know, lies and
Speaker 1: uh and so forth. Oh, that's interesting. So a lie
Speaker 1: could be like a thing that our bodies were not
Speaker 1: really a prepared to deal with very well, which is
Speaker 1: 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, of course this is something
Speaker 1: Just to to interject here, I think this is something
Speaker 1: 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 and defense, in 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. For 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 the 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 dinn itt that end up bringing up the
Speaker 1: illusory truth effect, but psychologists Pascal boy Yer in commentary
Speaker 1: on the paper, Uh, this particular paper from from McKay
Speaker 1: and Dinnet, 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, Boyer rights dramatic memory
Speaker 1: distortion seem to influence belief fixation. For instance, in the
Speaker 1: illusory truth effect, statements read several times are more likely
Speaker 1: rated as true than statements read only once. People who
Speaker 1: repeatedly imagine performing a particular action may end up believing
Speaker 1: they actually performed it. Oh yeah, this is something I've
Speaker 1: read before. If yeah, if so? If you just like
Speaker 1: have people walk through a task in their mind and
Speaker 1: then ask them later if they remember doing it. A
Speaker 1: 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,
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
Speaker 1: revision when plausible information is implied by experimenters in social
Speaker 1: contagion protocols, people tend to believe they actually saw what
Speaker 1: is in fact suggested by the confederate with whom they
Speaker 1: watched a video. So that he's just listing lots of
Speaker 1: the ways that we are end up with false beliefs.
Speaker 1: There's a plethora of examples of mechanisms for putting false
Speaker 1: beliefs in our brain. Right. Yeah, I know there's a
Speaker 1: lot of territory covered in this paper in the attached responses,
Speaker 1: but I can't I come back to the sort of
Speaker 1: key reason that I sought it out, Like, like, when
Speaker 1: is self self deception helpful? Is it necessary for the
Speaker 1: deception of others? It doesn't quite seem to be, Like,
Speaker 1: you don't have to believe the lie yourself to tell
Speaker 1: someone else the lie, regardless of what telling the lie
Speaker 1: repeatedly might do to you. Well, so, boy, he's skeptical
Speaker 1: of the idea, right, So is he basically saying, like,
Speaker 1: you don't want to overstate the the adaptiveness of believing lies.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he drives something that memory need only be
Speaker 1: as good as the advantage and decision making it affords. Okay,
Speaker 1: so he's essentially going for the byproduct thing for most
Speaker 1: most beliefs. He's he's saying like, look, you know, memory
Speaker 1: needs to do certain things, and in the course of
Speaker 1: doing those things, it may generate some false beliefs. We
Speaker 1: don't have to assume that those false beliefs themselves are beneficial, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and to come back to McKay and Dinnett, they
Speaker 1: point out that natural selection doesn't seem to care about truth.
Speaker 1: It only cares about reproductive success, so that there are
Speaker 1: various cases where a particular false belief or misbelief is
Speaker 1: seemingly adaptive. You believe in a non existent fire god, Okay,
Speaker 1: but say that its laws inhibit overt selfish behavior that
Speaker 1: gets you in trouble and not work out for you
Speaker 1: in the long run. So in that case, you have
Speaker 1: an adaptive misbelief. Now, if the fire God wherever to
Speaker 1: actually appear, then this would be an adaptive belief. But
Speaker 1: then there are arguably a whole host of other false
Speaker 1: ideas that seem adaptive positive self deceptions about ability the
Speaker 1: placebo effect for instance. Um, they bring up the self
Speaker 1: theories of intelligence, entity and incremental view of intelligence. Um.
Speaker 1: This being like, m Am, I born with a certain
Speaker 1: and uh intellect? Or do I develop it over time?
Speaker 1: And how those different core beliefs can affect your effectiveness
Speaker 1: in life Like doesn't mean like, oh, I've to work
Speaker 1: really hard in order to stay stay on top of
Speaker 1: this or is it a situation where oh, I'm I'm brilliant,
Speaker 1: I can accomplish anything. And and of course I think
Speaker 1: you can argue for pitfalls on both sides. And of
Speaker 1: course there's always the optimal margin of illusion in play,
Speaker 1: which comes to us from Roy f Ball moister. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, ultimately crazy over confidence as we do,
Speaker 1: as we discussed, is going to lead to extinction. Right,
Speaker 1: you don't want to cuddle the polar bear. Right, cuddling
Speaker 1: the polar bear thinking you can fly? Uh, These are
Speaker 1: going to lead you falling off the side of a
Speaker 1: mountain or winding up at a polar bear's tummy. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: I could certainly understand the idea of socially adaptive misbeliefs.
Speaker 1: I think that thing. Those things definitely do exist, and
Speaker 1: in some cases there might be some overlap with the
Speaker 1: types of things that get repeated so often, Like reasons
Speaker 1: for believing untrue things can also compound each other. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm about to explain why I think false beliefs gained
Speaker 1: through exposure and repetition are not adaptive in themselves. Uh,
Speaker 1: but you can have more than one reason for believing
Speaker 1: something that's untrue. Think about objectively untrue statements that get repeated,
Speaker 1: as we were talking about earlier in a political context.
Speaker 1: The evidence shows that we believe them partially because of
Speaker 1: how often they repeated, but there's also social cognition and
Speaker 1: also identity protective cognition. In other words, we tend to
Speaker 1: believe things that members of our political tribe and social
Speaker 1: in groups say, and for social cohesion reasons that that
Speaker 1: is adaptive for us. We also believe things that validate
Speaker 1: our sense of personal identity. But I think it's pretty
Speaker 1: clear that that these types of effects can work in
Speaker 1: a nasty perverse tag team format, boosting and complementing one another.
Speaker 1: But even if we we put aside these complementary effects,
Speaker 1: put aside uh, social and identity protective cognition, put those
Speaker 1: aside and just focus on the explanation for the illusory
Speaker 1: truth effect and repetition. There's a really interesting thing that
Speaker 1: comes out, and this is based on the idea of
Speaker 1: pros tessing fluency, which is it's a it's a concept
Speaker 1: that is way more interesting than the name would let
Speaker 1: you real. So the dominant explanation for the illusory truth
Speaker 1: effect in the psychology literature, which we're about to get into, um,
Speaker 1: it fits into this byproduct category that we were just
Speaker 1: talking about. Based on all I read, it seems the
Speaker 1: informed majority opinion of psychologists is that the illusion of
Speaker 1: truth that we get from exposure and repetition is an
Speaker 1: unfortunate byproduct of generally useful cognitive heuristic. Now, a heuristic,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about before, is a mental shortcut. It's
Speaker 1: a fast and cheap trick that the brain uses to
Speaker 1: arrive at a judgment or produce some kind of result
Speaker 1: without using too much effort. And it's it's worth driving
Speaker 1: home that our brains need fast and cheap tricks. Brains
Speaker 1: are very energy hungry. Yeah yeah, there's only there's only
Speaker 1: so much power to go around there, so it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's kind of has to hold everything together with a
Speaker 1: bunch of tricks. Yeah, so it works something like this.
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 a 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 anything. Well,
Speaker 1: and also lies lies it in large part have to
Speaker 1: be believable. Like think about the various true statements and
Speaker 1: uh and false statements that might be uttered during the
Speaker 1: course of a given day at work. Yes, somebody, hey,
Speaker 1: where's 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: It generally does not serve people well to lie about
Speaker 1: the location of the bathroom, right, because you're gonna find
Speaker 1: out and then you're gonna say, hey, why did you
Speaker 1: tell 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. Then
Speaker 1: that kind of lie, yeah, you'll never find out, you know,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly. Or I can't come into work today because
Speaker 1: I'm sick, Well all right, I'm you know, we're not
Speaker 1: going to ask for a doctor's note. You might be lying,
Speaker 1: you might not, but it's just kind of a gimme
Speaker 1: on that situation. Yeah, that's another reason that we're more
Speaker 1: likely to be exposed to true statements generally, or at
Speaker 1: least that were more likely to detect true statements generally,
Speaker 1: because false statements are harder to verify, usually by design
Speaker 1: of the person making them. So you're able to find
Speaker 1: yourself in an environment that's mostly built out of uh
Speaker 1: 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: Has the food taster come up, put the mid transfer
Speaker 1: this gobblet 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 simulated in my head. And in
Speaker 1: cases of people who can form mental pictures, you have
Speaker 1: 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, it's a false positive.
Speaker 1: Uh uh that uh, that I I'm imagining this is
Speaker 1: a possible outcome, and then maybe I'm more inclined to
Speaker 1: believe it just so that I can keep it from
Speaker 1: harming me. Yeah. I think that's a very very reasonable
Speaker 1: way of imagining it. But so here's where we get
Speaker 1: into the final part of our discussion today, which is
Speaker 1: the idea of what I mentioned a minute ago, processing fluency.
Speaker 1: So processing fluency just means how easy it is to
Speaker 1: process incoming information. And you wouldn't believe the research on
Speaker 1: how many of our decisions and mental outcomes seem to
Speaker 1: be based at least in part on processing fluency. The
Speaker 1: brain really really likes things to be easy. It really
Speaker 1: likes things to be to go smooth, to not be
Speaker 1: too difficult. Uh So, to start off, based on existing research,
Speaker 1: it definitely seems true that people have an easier time
Speaker 1: processing statements and information they've heard before. In fact, Robert,
Speaker 1: you probably know this from direct experience. Like a familiar
Speaker 1: statement when used in the context of a sentence or
Speaker 1: an argument, is processed quite smoothly, but a new, unfamiliar
Speaker 1: statement in the same context often causes you to say, wait,
Speaker 1: hold on, back up, I need to wrap my head
Speaker 1: around this. Familiar is easy, unfamiliar is difficult. But how
Speaker 1: would you test whether the ease of processing information we're
Speaker 1: actually affecting our judgment of the truth of a statement.
Speaker 1: And I want to get into a couple of quick,
Speaker 1: really interesting studies on this that we're so simple and
Speaker 1: so brilliant. So in Rayburn Schwartz did a study and
Speaker 1: consciousness and cognition called Effects of perceptual Fluency on judgments
Speaker 1: of truth, and they took true or false statements, kind
Speaker 1: of like in the studies we've seen before of the
Speaker 1: variety osorn no Is in Chile or Greenland has roughly
Speaker 1: fifty inhabitants, and they presented those statements to people, and
Speaker 1: the main independent variable was that they presented the statements
Speaker 1: either against a white background, in a high contrast, easy
Speaker 1: to read color, or in a low contrast, hard to
Speaker 1: read color, And apparently that made all the difference in
Speaker 1: the world. The idea is that the hard to read
Speaker 1: one has low processing fluency, it's difficult, and the easy
Speaker 1: to read one has high processing fluency. It's easy to process.
Speaker 1: And they found that this made a big difference in
Speaker 1: what people believed was true or false. Uh that quote.
Speaker 1: Moderately visible statements were judged as true at chance level,
Speaker 1: whereas highly visible statements were judged as true significantly above
Speaker 1: chance level. We conclude the perceptual fluency affects judgments of truth.
Speaker 1: This is 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
Speaker 1: preference like there is one study from Novimski at All
Speaker 1: published in two thousand seven in the Journal of Marketing
Speaker 1: Research that in short, it found that consumers more often
Speaker 1: tend 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's just like you would
Speaker 1: want it just very clear, but old letters. Well, didn't
Speaker 1: they try to change the can when agod I haven't
Speaker 1: really 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 in judgments of truth according to the
Speaker 1: cues ecological validity, meaning like successfulness in the real world. Quote.
Speaker 1: That is, the truth effect occurs because repetition leads to
Speaker 1: more fluent processing of a statement, and people have learned
Speaker 1: that the experience of processing fluency correlates positively with the
Speaker 1: truth of a statement. So this is sort of what
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier. It's a heuristic that you know,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to encounter true statements in the wild.
Speaker 1: People learn this through experience, and then they use the
Speaker 1: the the queue of processing fluency to to be the
Speaker 1: judge of whether something is familiar or not. And if
Speaker 1: it's familiar and they get that processing fluency bump it's
Speaker 1: easy to process, then they're more likely to believe it's
Speaker 1: true because that's what has worked for them in the past.
Speaker 1: And if this is true, Uncle Box says, I bet
Speaker 1: I could reverse it with a little bit of training,
Speaker 1: and he does. He's got an experiment where with a
Speaker 1: training phase he actually does three different experiments, and essentially
Speaker 1: what he does is that he trains people in a
Speaker 1: scenario where things that are easier to process, either because
Speaker 1: of being easier to read or because of repetition and familiarity.
Speaker 1: Either way, those things are more correlated with the thing
Speaker 1: with the thing being false, and when people get trained
Speaker 1: in sessions like that, they lose the effect. So the
Speaker 1: good takeaway there is that if he's correct, it would
Speaker 1: probably also mean that your susceptibility to the lusory truth
Speaker 1: effect is dependent on what kind of environment you've trained in,
Speaker 1: and that you could potentially untrain yourself on it. But
Speaker 1: that would be hard to do because we all live
Speaker 1: in this world all the time where most of the
Speaker 1: time people are telling us true things, right, and and again,
Speaker 1: the brain is still going to need all of these
Speaker 1: shortcuts in order to function properly. Yeah, exactly, But you
Speaker 1: could just be using the opposite shortcut, Like if you
Speaker 1: live in a world where people lie to you all
Speaker 1: the time. Uncle Bock's results here would suggest that you
Speaker 1: would eventually adapt to this, and you would instead become
Speaker 1: exactly the opposite. New claims you've never heard before would
Speaker 1: seem more true to you, and repeated claims that you're
Speaker 1: familiar with would seem like lies to you. Okay, so
Speaker 1: there's hopeful us after all. Yeah, I mean, but we
Speaker 1: can't expect to live in a world like that, and
Speaker 1: we don't want to live in a world like like
Speaker 1: like that, Like you don't want to train your brain
Speaker 1: to live in a world where everything is assumed to
Speaker 1: be a lie. And make surely somebody has has considered
Speaker 1: exploring this in fiction. Yeah, it would be it would
Speaker 1: be a delicate affair to to really put it together
Speaker 1: and make it work on paper. But it's a world
Speaker 1: that I don't want to live in, but I kind
Speaker 1: of want to visit fictionally. Oh yeah, i'd go there
Speaker 1: with you. That that's a good one to to come
Speaker 1: back to. But just as a quick note before we
Speaker 1: close out today, I think this idea of processing fluency
Speaker 1: is a really interesting one. There's tons of research on it, Like, uh,
Speaker 1: there is a study I found by Sasha Topalinski fromen
Speaker 1: in Cognition and Emotion about how processing fluency affects how
Speaker 1: funny we find jokes that apparently if a joke is
Speaker 1: easier to process, we've got high processing fluency on the joke,
Speaker 1: we think it's funnier. I guess it just like feels
Speaker 1: good to get it without with less effort or something.
Speaker 1: Uh So there were multiple experiments, but basically here, let
Speaker 1: me let me give you a quick preview. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say a word, Robert, peanuts. Do you like that word
Speaker 1: when you think about it? Peanuts? Peanuts? It's pretty good.
Speaker 1: It's it's not the funniest, where's no cheese, but but
Speaker 1: but I like it Okay, I just said that word.
Speaker 1: So one example of this type of study would be
Speaker 1: if you prime somebody with significant nouns from the punch
Speaker 1: line of a joke fifteen minutes or even up to
Speaker 1: just one minute before you tell them the joke, people
Speaker 1: find the joke more hilarious. However, if you tell them
Speaker 1: a significant noun from the punch line immediately before the joke,
Speaker 1: they find the joke less funny, and the authors think
Speaker 1: this is probably just or the author thinks this is
Speaker 1: because if you tell them right before the joke, it
Speaker 1: sort of spoils the punch line. But knock, knock, who's there? Cash? Cash? Who? No? Thanks?
Speaker 1: I prefer peanuts. Ah see, it works. It's not even aigg,
Speaker 1: not 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 stand up
Speaker 1: comedy by any stretch of the imagination, but I watching
Speaker 1: us stand up to see that just that that common
Speaker 1: structural tool that they use where you have the call
Speaker 1: back to a previous joke, and they'll often do it
Speaker 1: 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. Yeah, it generates laughter,
Speaker 1: and it's 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, then you've just got Jeff over here, and
Speaker 1: 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, because I sure do here here
Speaker 1: Jeff uh talking trash about it all the time. Or
Speaker 1: you could walk away from it being like, man, I
Speaker 1: don't understand all these people who hate Aliens, even though
Speaker 1: it's just one person. Yeah, that that seems to be
Speaker 1: something that would go on. Processing fluency also appears to
Speaker 1: have something to do with aesthetic pleasure. There's been a
Speaker 1: lot of research and theory about this that that's a
Speaker 1: major component of what feels aesthetically pleasing to us is
Speaker 1: based on what's easy to process. Another part is that
Speaker 1: processing fluencing fluency apparently affects how credible a face looks.
Speaker 1: So if are you going to believe somebody, well, it
Speaker 1: turns out if their face is easier to process, especially
Speaker 1: because you've seen it a bunch of times before, you're
Speaker 1: more likely to believe it. Even if they're not famous
Speaker 1: and they're not somebody you know, they're not like somebody
Speaker 1: you've had experience with that you can you know, judge
Speaker 1: their credibility just random faces shown to you in different
Speaker 1: sessions of an experiment. If you've seen them before, they're
Speaker 1: more credible. Of course, that reminds me of various experiments
Speaker 1: over the years involving the believability of people with beards.
Speaker 1: People with facial hair or beards harder to process. They
Speaker 1: have I have not looked into it recently, so I
Speaker 1: don't know if there any are recent studies that that
Speaker 1: the crack this nut. But but there there have been
Speaker 1: studies that have looked in the past where they make
Speaker 1: the argument that, yes, an individual with a beard, you're
Speaker 1: going to have a little more distrust towards them. Well,
Speaker 1: obviously nobody should trust me. Well, no, we trust you
Speaker 1: because we know you. Joe. Yeah, do you really? Do
Speaker 1: you ever really know someone? Well, I'll tell you one
Speaker 1: thing I know, and that's peanuts stuff. You got me,
Speaker 1: You got me there, you made me laugh and my
Speaker 1: joke didn't make you. Okay, Okay, So we gotta wrap
Speaker 1: up there. We've gone long here, but so we'll be
Speaker 1: back in the next episode to explore more recent findings
Speaker 1: and some of the ways that the illusory truth effect
Speaker 1: really does matter in our in our political and social world. Um,
Speaker 1: but so main takeaways I would say today is that
Speaker 1: the illusory truth effect is real. Exposure and repetition really
Speaker 1: does change our beliefs. The illusory truth effect is small,
Speaker 1: meaning it doesn't automatically overwhelm other criteria in our decision
Speaker 1: making and judgment. In fact, in many cases it appears
Speaker 1: that there are not a statement is actually true is
Speaker 1: more important to our judgment than whether or not it's
Speaker 1: repeated or made easier to read, or any of these
Speaker 1: other processing fluency boosts. But on average, over lots of repetitions,
Speaker 1: it's easy to see how this could have a big effect,
Speaker 1: especially when you bring it back to propaganda purposes on
Speaker 1: things we believe as a society, things that shift voting
Speaker 1: patterns in small but significant ways, and stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the key. That it's not occurring within a vacuum.
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's it's it's affecting and being affected by
Speaker 1: all these other um mental processes and factors that are
Speaker 1: affecting our decision making and worldview totally. But we will
Speaker 1: get more into that in our next episode. In the meantime,
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