I can convince you of just about anything‼️

I can’t remember a more toxic, more divisive, more truth- less political environment than the one in which now we find ourselves – aided greatly by social media. Lazy thinkers may be the greatest threat we face.

The illusory truth effect doesn’t just affect us by accident, either: Propagandists understand that repetition is key to getting people to accept your message, even if they don’t believe it at first. Even Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that “Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea.”⁸ When politicians repeat obvious untruths again, and again, and again, we should not just roll our eyes and write it off as a blunder; we should recognize that this is a deliberate strategy, aiming to familiarize people with the lie being told until they accept that lie as truth.

This all might be sounding a little overly dramatic, but this worry is warranted. Misinformation poses a sinister threat to democracy, and to the functioning of civil society in general. Around the world, fake news has fueled acts of violence; for example, in 2018, rumors spread on WhatsApp sparked a mob killing in India.⁶ As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the globe, conspiracy theories have driven large crowds of protesters to march in opposition to social distancing and mask regulations.⁹

Exercise your critical thinking and cognitive abilities

Clearly, the problem is not a lack of awareness: people know that unreliable information circulates online. It seems that they just don’t think that they would ever fall for those stories. It’s important to be aware of the illusory truth effect, and other biases that affect our judgment, so that we are motivated to pause and think a bit more critically about information we might otherwise accept as true.

How to avoid it

The illusory truth effect is tricky to avoid. Because it is driven by System 1, our unconscious and automatic processing system, we usually don’t realize when we’ve fallen prey to it. It’s also a very pervasive bias: research has shown that people are equally susceptible to the illusory truth effect, regardless of their particular way of thinking.¹⁰ That said, by making a deliberate and concerted effort to be critical of the claims we encounter, it is possible to get around this effect.

“Critical thinking” might seem like a boring, obvious answer to this problem, but it’s the best thing you can do to avoid falling for the illusory truth effect. With such massive amounts of information filtering past our eyeballs every day, it’s easy to let suspicious claims slide and just move onto the next tweet, or the next status update. But by neglecting to think critically the first time we encounter a false statement, we make ourselves more susceptible to the illusory truth effect.

In short, fact-checking claims the first time you hear them is important to reduce the power of the illusory truth effect. Google is your friend, and when it comes to lies that have political implications, websites like Politifact and Snopes are constantly working to fact-check and debunk fake news. Also try to train yourself to be aware of red flags that you might be reading bad intel. These include things like vague or untraceable sources; poor spelling and grammar; and stories that seem like they would be huge scoops, yet aren’t being reported on by any mainstream sources.¹²

The Decision Lab