Convince Someone That Your Stupid Idea Is Correct by Simply Repeating It Over and Over.
There is an old adage that when you repeat a lie enough, it becomes true. Psychologists call the illusory truth effect . BBC Future explores how it works, why it works and why not.
As humans, we tend to believe things that are believable, which means that when someone makes a ridiculous statement without scientific support, but we think that this statement may be true, we tend to believe it. The more this statement is repeated, the more plausible it sounds. Unless, of course, we take the trouble to actually investigate a statement.
If you have prior knowledge of a subject, say you have studied greenhouse gas emissions for 30 years, someone is simply repeating that climate change is unrealistic and will not affect you. When armed with knowledge, you can fight the effect of an illusory truth. However, repetition can make a statement feel this way, but it cannot redefine the knowledge that we need the other way around. This does not mean that the effect of the illusory truth does not work for everyone, because you are probably not an expert on everything. Here’s the future of the BBC:
If every time you heard something, you compared it to everything you already know, you would still think about breakfast during dinner. Because we need to make decisions quickly, we use shortcuts — heuristics that are more likely to be correct than wrong. Relying on how often you’ve heard something to judge how true something seems to be is just one strategy. Any universe where truth is repeated more often than lies, even if only 51% versus 49%, will be one where it’s a quick and dirty rule for judging facts.
This is all to say that while you cannot convince an expert that his knowledge is wrong, everyone else is still ripe for manipulation. Here’s BBC Future on fighting it:
If repetition was the only thing that influenced what we thought, we would have problems, but it is not. We can all use the broader scope of reasoning, but we must admit that it is a limited resource. Our minds fall prey to the illusion of the effect of truth because our instinct is to take shortcuts to judge the plausibility of something. This often works. Sometimes this is a delusion.
Once we know about the effect, we can prevent it. This is partly a double check of why we believe what we are doing: if something seems plausible, is it because it really is true, or have we just been told it repeatedly? This is why scientists are so crazy about links – so that we can trace the origin of any statement, instead of taking it on faith.
In short, the BS detector will discharge over time. Keep up the good work and eventually you will be able to convince people of all sorts of things. It doesn’t even have to be so vile. It might just be stupid. For example, if you say over and over that The Core is a good movie for everyone who listens to it, eventually people will believe you because they probably have never seen it or know otherwise.
How Liars Create the “Illusion of Truth” | Bbc future