Convince Someone That Your Dumb Idea Is True By Simply Repeating It Over And Over | Lifehacker Australia
Image by www.hacienda-la.colora.com [Flickr]
If you have prior knowledge of a subject, say, you've been studying greenhouse gas emissions for 30 years, someone just repeating that climate change isn't real won't have an effect on you. When you're armed with knowledge, you can fight against the illusory truth effect. Still, repetition might make a statement feel true, but it can't override knowledge that we have to the contrary. This doesn't mean that the illusory truth effect doesn't effect everyone, because you're probably not an expert in everything. Here's BBC Future:
If every time you heard something you assessed it against everything you already knew, you'd still be thinking about breakfast at supper-time. Because we need to make quick judgements, we adopt shortcuts — heuristics which are right more often than wrong. Relying on how often you've heard something to judge how truthful something feels is just one strategy. Any universe where truth gets repeated more often than lies, even if only 51% vs 49% will be one where this is a quick and dirty rule for judging facts.
Which is all to say that while you can't convince an expert that their knowledge is wrong, everyone else out there is still ripe for manipulation. Here's BBC Future on fighting against this:
Once we know about the effect we can guard against it. Part of this is double-checking why we believe what we do — if something sounds plausible is it because it really is true, or have we just been told that repeatedly? This is why scholars are so mad about providing references - so we can track the origin on any claim, rather than having to take it on faith.
In short, a person's BS detector will eventually run out of batteries. Keep at it and eventually you can convince people of all kinds of things. This doesn't even need to be all that nefarious. It can just be something stupid. Like, if you repeat over and over again that The Core is a good movie to anyone who will listen, eventually people will believe you, because they have probably never seen it and don't have any knowledge to the contrary.
How liars create the 'illusion of truth' [BBC Future]
I'm going to build a wall. I'm going to build a wall. I'm going to build a wall. I'm going to build a wall. I'm going to build a wall.
Nov 11, 2016, 11:36am
When losing a verbal argument, some people keep repeating their line louder each time. It does not help them.
Convince Someone That Your Dumb Idea Is True By Simply Repeating It Over And Over | Lifehacker Australia
Image by www.hacienda-la.colora.com [Flickr]
If you have prior knowledge of a subject, say, you've been studying greenhouse gas emissions for 30 years, someone just repeating that climate change isn't real won't have an effect on you. When you're armed with knowledge, you can fight against the illusory truth effect. Still, repetition might make a statement feel true, but it can't override knowledge that we have to the contrary. This doesn't mean that the illusory truth effect doesn't effect everyone, because you're probably not an expert in everything. Here's BBC Future:
If every time you heard something you assessed it against everything you already knew, you'd still be thinking about breakfast at supper-time. Because we need to make quick judgements, we adopt shortcuts — heuristics which are right more often than wrong. Relying on how often you've heard something to judge how truthful something feels is just one strategy. Any universe where truth gets repeated more often than lies, even if only 51% vs 49% will be one where this is a quick and dirty rule for judging facts.
Which is all to say that while you can't convince an expert th
at their knowledge is wrong, everyone else out there is still ripe for manipulation. Here's BBC Future on fighting against this:
Once we know about the effect we can guard against it. Part of this is double-checking why we believe what we do — if something sounds plausible is it because it really is true, or have we just been told that repeatedly? This is why scholars are so mad about providing references - so we can track the origin on any claim, rather than having to take it on faith.
In short, a person's BS detector will eventually run out of batteries. Keep at it and eventually you can convince people of all kinds of things. This doesn't even need to be all that nefarious. It can just be something stupid. Like, if you repeat over and over again that The Core is a good movie to anyone who will listen, eventually people will believe you, because they have probably never seen it and don't have any knowledge to the contrary.
How liars create the 'illusion of truth' [BBC Future]
I'm going to build a wall. I'm going to build a wall. I'm going to build a wall. I'm going to build a wall. I'm going to build a wall.
Nov 11, 2016, 11:36am
When losing a verbal argument, some people keep repeating their line louder each time. It does not help them.