Well, if true, this is depressing going into the campaign: Your Brain Lies to You

NYT: Op-Ed Contributor
Your Brain Lies to You
By SAM WANG and SANDRA AAMODT
Published: June 27, 2008

FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls....

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Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man....

(Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and Sandra Aamodt, a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opinion/27aamodt.html

Its the approach many campaigns take of ignoring smears to minimize them and hope they go away. That doesn't always work so well.

what to do?

He isn't out there repeating the smears a lot but there's a place to find the truth. And a very effective approach I see being used is to bring it up and laugh about it a little, as though its ridiculous anyone would believe it. That has an impact on people.

and could help.

Maybe it's just me.

I go to Snopes and respond to the e-mails with a Snopes link.

Just to counteract that,

Obama is a Christian.
Barack Obama worships in a Christian church.
Obama has a Christian religion and philosophy.

Modern marketting certainly works on these lines, though the techniques arose without the research, out of simple observation. Basically, advertising purchase is calculated to ensure that the persons aimed at will see the advertisement several times, which will suffice, like the advertisement or not, to embed its message in the viewer's mind and become part of what conditions the person's consciousness on the topic, be it desire for a snack or purchase of an automobile.

This piece suggests that the best way to counter false charges is not to argue with them or seek to expose their falsehood, but simply to maintain the opposite of them, strenuously and frequently, so that your view is received more often then your opponent's.

It has always pleased me when people copy my piece into their's when attempting to refute it, especially when they seperate it out, and do a paragraph of mine followed by their comments on it, and then again, and so on. Thus people following the argument will read my comments twice, and their's only once, which has always seemed to me to be to my advantage. You will damned near never see me give an opponent space in my posts like that....

And that's a handy insight to remember: Most of the techniques were later justified by research, but the techniques themselves, their employ, and their limitations, are of long-standing.

One noted scholar seems to have it the other way around: He advocates a certain kind of process, long known to ad agencies. And, while the ad agencies know that it often flops--and have a sense as to why it flops--since the scholar has arrived at the process by logical deduction, he judges it incapable of producing flops.

The triumph of reason, even imperfect, over reality ... no less imperfect.

By all means, maintaining your message is the key, not simply denying the other's message. However, confirmation bias and a lack of openness to evaluating your message may make it a losing proposition, in any event. The best any can do is try, and make it so that confirmation bias either nearly insurmountable hurdles to tackle.

I wish i can find the article. It talked in more depth of how a rumor/lie can be put into culture and better believed than the truth and talked about ways to get around it. Your giving an example of the "muslim" smear is a perfect one and if i recall the only way to fight it (using the article as reference) is to do what you said "stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man"

The second statement above is well-considered by all good coaches and teachers - never coach or teach what you don't want someone to do or learn, teach them only what you want them to do or learn:

"Gosh, that's very interesting. Where did you learn that?"

Imparted with just the right amount of 'gee, I wish I were that smart', and then followed up gently when the person flounders it can be very effective.

"This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls...."


This is what also happened to Clinton in the primaries. Nearly every week there was a new and different attack based on flimsy to non-existent evidence repeated ad nasuem until the source was not even considered and it became "truth."