Illusory Truth – are you a victim?

What better time to discuss the workings of the human brain with so many operating on faulty autopilot.

I have no way of knowing this of course, but it appears seeking truth is no longer part of the thinking equation. It’s like nobody wants to pull the curtain and see the Wizard of Oz for what he is.

Nobody (I exaggerate- but not by much) wants to think, to take time to question or discover the facts, the truth. I look at social media and read things like “the trillions we have sent to the Ukraine” “we have open borders” or “all would be well if Congress had not stolen the Social Security funds”

No truth in any of the above.

There is a scientific term for believing what is not true – illusory truth. Politicians use this to their advantage all the time. Right now we have a master of illusory truth as a good example. Over and over every day, “election interference” even as we are more than a year from an election.

How many times do you need to claim that key parts of our government our filled with “Marxists, Fascists, and Communists” out to get one man?

Is that what you believe about your government and the people who work for it?

What is the Illusory Truth Effect?

The illusory truth effect, also known as the illusion of truth, describes how, when we hear the same false information repeated again and again, we often come to believe it is true. Troublingly, this even happens when people should know better—that is, when people initially know that the misinformation is false.

Individual effects

We all like to think of ourselves as being impervious to misinformation, but even the most well-informed individuals are still prone to the illusory truth effect. We may be skeptical of a false claim the first time it floats through our Twitter timeline, but the more we are exposed to it, the more we start to feel like it’s true—and our pre-existing knowledge can’t prevent this.

Systemic effects

In the age of social media, it’s incredibly easy for misinformation to spread quickly to huge numbers of people. The evidence suggests that global politics have already been strongly influenced by online propaganda campaigns, run by bad actors who understand that all they need to do to help a lie gain traction is to repeat it again and again. While it may sound overly dramatic, this is a threat to the integrity of democracy itself, and to the cohesion of our societies. Now more than ever, it is important to be aware of the fact that the way we assess the accuracy of information is biased.

Why it happens

How do we gauge whether a claim is true or false? Naturally, you would think, we use our existing base of knowledge, and maybe a couple of well-placed Google searches, to compare that claim to the available evidence. No rational person would accept a statement as true without first holding it up to the light and critically examining it, right?

Unfortunately, humans are rarely rational beings. Every single day, we make an average of 35,000 decisions.¹⁹ With all of those choices to make, and the huge volume of information that is coming at us every second, we can’t possibly hope to process everything as deeply as we might like.

To conserve our limited mental energy, we rely on countless shortcuts, known as heuristics, to make sense of the world, and this can often lead us to make errors in our judgment. There are a few fundamental heuristics and biases that underlie the illusory truth effect.

We are often cognitively lazy

According to the renowned behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, there are two thinking systems in our brains. System 1 is fast and automatic, working without our awareness; meanwhile, System 2 handles deeper, more effortful processing, and is under our conscious control.¹ System 2, since it’s doing the harder work, drains more of our cognitive resources; it’s effortful and straining to engage, which we don’t like. So, wherever possible, we prefer to rely on System 1 (even if we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing).

SOURCE: The Decision Lab