Persistence of false beliefs.

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I came across these articles via my Urban Legends email list, and found them very interesting. Fits in beautifully with how unreliable our memories are! But very gloomy.

The memory stuff is also fascinating.

Eg: I read some research into the so called "flash bulb" memory: After the space shuttle blew up (I forget which one it was...but it was the one that left bits of itself all over at least one state, not the one that blew up on launch).

People were interviewed 24 hours after the event, about where they were, who was with them, what they saw/heard etc. and the interviews recorded.

A year later, they were interviewed again, and their memories had shifted considerably. All believed they had the same memories as when first interviewed. When the original interview was played to them, many claimed that the recordings were fake, or that the new memories were the accurate ones.

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 4, 2007; Page A03

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane.

Those notions remain widespread even though the federal government now runs Web sites in seven languages to challenge them. Karen Hughes, who runs the Bush administration's campaign to win hearts and minds in the fight against terrorism, recently painted a glowing report of the "digital outreach" teams working to counter misinformation and myths by challenging those ideas on Arabic blogs.

A report last year by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, however, found that the number of Muslims worldwide who do not believe that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks is soaring -- to 59 percent of Turks and Egyptians, 65 percent of Indonesians, 53 percent of Jordanians, 41 percent of Pakistanis and even 56 percent of British Muslims.

Research on the difficulty of debunking myths has not been specifically tested on beliefs about Sept. 11 conspiracies or the Iraq war. But because the experiments illuminate basic properties of the human mind, psychologists such as Schwarz say the same phenomenon is probably implicated in the spread and persistence of a variety of political and social myths.

The research does not absolve those who are responsible for promoting myths in the first place. What the psychological studies highlight, however, is the potential paradox in trying to fight bad information with good information.

Schwarz's study was published this year in the journal Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, but the roots of the research go back decades. As early as 1945, psychologists Floyd Allport and Milton Lepkin found that the more often people heard false wartime rumors, the more likely they were to believe them.

The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind works. Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain uses subconscious "rules of thumb" that can bias it into thinking that false information is true. Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency......

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Here's a long, but interesting, research report about the phenomenon:

It's a Pdf, you'll need Acrobat

Parents have long been advised not to say "Don't do xxxxxx" (an unacceptable behaviour) but instead to say "Do xxxxxxxxx" (this x being the behaviour that is wanted instead) on the basis that kids tend to retain the idea of the unacceptable behaviour, not the "don't."

What do you think?

Makes me want to find a brick wall to hit my head against, go kill the beastly Iraqis who blew up the WTC, and punish the poor Jewish fella who burned the German Reichstag Building in 1930 whatever.

The WP article goes on to say that, if you wish to build a Great Lie, you get in early, and get in often...(Goebbels knew that, so do more modern Great Lie builders)...that bias affects what we retain, and that denials can imprint the wrong information even more firmly into the heads of those who are prone to believe it.

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That's precisely why I'm always fighting with the older members of my familly.

They always render accounts of early years in a way I know it's false.

Some times I do the same as the researchers, as I have movies from more than twenty years ago that prove them false.

Weird thing the memory is and how fragile is human testimony...

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I remember Francis. I remember a very nice person. I remember a cheese eating surrender monkey.

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That's false! I never met you!

And I have pictures to prove it....

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Francis wrote:

That's precisely why I'm always fighting with the older members of my familly.

They always render accounts of early years in a way I know it's false.

Some times I do the same as the researchers, as I have movies from more than twenty years ago that prove them false.

Weird thing the memory is and how fragile is human testimony...

Ahem. Please note the younger folk just take a few more days to smeg things up.

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Or a few more years...

Anyway, I want to be tested against recordings...

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Makes sense the brain would always try to re-affirm its notions of truth.

Quote:

Parents have long been advised not to say "Don't do xxxxxx" (an unacceptable behaviour) but instead to say "Do xxxxxxxxx" (this x being the behaviour that is wanted instead) on the basis that kids tend to retain the idea of the unacceptable behaviour, not the "don't."

I think this has to do with a different phenomenon, that kids always want to disobey their parents and be rebellious.

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Quincy wrote:

a. Makes sense the brain would always try to re-affirm its notions of truth.

Quote:
Parents have long been advised not to say "Don't do xxxxxx" (an unacceptable behaviour) but instead to say "Do xxxxxxxxx" (this x being the behaviour that is wanted instead) on the basis that kids tend to retain the idea of the unacceptable behaviour, not the "don't."

b. I think this has to do with a different phenomenon, that kids always want to disobey their parents and be rebellious.

a. You'd think that would be a losing strategy, wouldn't you? That is, to have a bias about processing information. I wonder if rapidity and ease of processing (not being overwhelmed), and "going along to get along" in our very socially needy species, plus avoidance of the discomfort of cognitive dissonance has made it a frequently useful strategy for us over the millenia? I wonder if our brains react without, or with less, bias in immediate life and death decisions?

b. Possibly, but not necessarily. In fact, if the positive command (do xxxx) works better than the negative command (don't do xxx) then that is suggestive of the described memory phenomenon also obtaining with kids, alongside their normal tendency to defy.

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a might be a losing strategy, but not everything we've evolved serves any real purpose, let alone advantage. a vestigal tail is pretty damned useless, our brains might evolve further (i hope so.)

i'm no expert in neurology, but i imagine the brain, holding information in its vast redundant network, simplified to holding these two pieces of information:

1. smacking your annoying sibling
2. is wrong

in fact, "is wrong" is a very fluid idea in the mind, tied by association to countless things, as is everything else in the brain.

as we live, some ideas become stronger than others. the connection, in the "front of our mind" anyway, between 2. and 1. may not be as strong by comparison, to other mental concepts of "is wrong," or whether it actually "fades" or not, it might get drowned out by other thinking/memories.

then the only thing you remember is 1, but from a practical standpoint, it doesn't retain the stronger connection to 2. if you really think about it, the connection should be easy, but have you ever REALLY TRIED to remember something on the tip of your tongue, something you knew just the day before? without constant reassociation, these things "fade," for lack of a better word.

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While I suspect all families rewrite history to some degree, some families are much more creative than others about altering an unpalatable past to increase personal luster.

"We" are reliable historians and "they" are prone to (or perhaps dedicated to) historical perfidity.

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Cool. I love this stuff.

I remember reading about it in a pedagogical context. That is, I learned that I shouldn't teach the myth, or what not to do -- just teach the positives (what is true, what one should do.). People mash things together -- authority (teacher) paired with factoid becomes compartmentalized as "factoid is true," whether the factoid was being taught as true or false.

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Scary, isn't it?

That is the thing the article suggests: Do not deny a myth, but state the fact without also stating the myth.

Still damned tough to correct......witness the persistence of the Iraq = 9/11 construct and the "It wasn't us, it was them" from the Arab side.

Sigh.

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I've noticed that many kids who are allowed to operate from passion without a leavening of logic are able to convince themselves that the other kid started it.

Unfortunately, some adults are also able to rehearse their wrongs into rights.

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People just love a good story. Even if they have to make it up and convince themselves it's true.

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Noddy24 wrote:

I've noticed that many kids who are allowed to operate from passion without a leavening of logic are able to convince themselves that the other kid started it.

Unfortunately, some adults are also able to rehearse their wrongs into rights.

Noddy, your gift of understatement is of almost spooky dimensions.

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Dlowan--

Thanks for the kind words.

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The long term memory of the present generation has some drawbacks.
Baddeley (1966) found that after 20 minutes, test subjects had the greatest difficulty recalling a collection of words that had similar meanings (e.g. big, large, great, huge).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory

Millenia ago, the Vedas were never put to writing. Hindus were supposed
recite and remember more than a million Slokas (stanzas) of the Vedas.

"The text in its surviving form was redacted in the Iron Age (c. 9th to 7th century BCE). The fixed text was preserved for more than a millennium by oral tradition alone and was probably not put in writing until the Gupta
period."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda

Since memory capabilities were gradually declining, it became necessary
to put Vedas to writing.

Ancient Europeans wrote about Ages of Man:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man

There are also many other references to various
types of world ages or Ages of Man in Hopi
(worlds), Mayan (suns) and other cultures of
antiquity. Giorgio de Santillana, the former
professsor of the history of science, mentions
approximately thirty ancient cultures that
believed in the concept of a series of ages and
the rise and fall of history, with alternating
Dark and Golden Ages.

More information about these ages is available in
the Yuga concept of the Hindus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Yuga

The Vedas were originally conceived during
Satya Yuga when the memory and knowledge
capabilities of people were the highest. The
present age is known as the age of darkness
(Kali Yuga). Memory capabilities of common
public are bound to be low in this age.

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I'm not sure if it's fair to say that memory abilities are declining -- I think it's more that the memory abilities are there but the willingness to do what is necessary to memorize the Vedas is declining. (The work involved, the relative lack of prestige once it has been done, fewer occasions to recite, etc., etc.)

Noddy, that was indeed an amazing line. I know just what you mean.

That by the way is another aspect of this. If righteous wrong-doer recasts a situation often enough -- by giving his or her version to a sympathetic friend, for example -- that version eventually supplants the "real" memory. (But a big part of all of this research is that the idea of a "real" memory is basically suspect -- that memories are fluid and some things are more likely to make them fall in line with reality and some things make them less likely.)

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sozobe wrote:

I'm not sure if it's fair to say that memory abilities are declining -- I think it's more that the memory abilities are there but the willingness to do what is necessary to memorize the Vedas is declining. (The work involved, the relative lack of prestige once it has been done, fewer occasions to recite, etc., etc.)

Noddy, that was indeed an amazing line. I know just what you mean.

That by the way is another aspect of this. If righteous wrong-doer recasts a situation often enough -- by giving his or her version to a sympathetic friend, for example -- that version eventually supplants the "real" memory. (But a big part of all of this research is that the idea of a "real" memory is basically suspect -- that memories are fluid and some things are more likely to make them fall in line with reality and some things make them less likely.)

Aaaarrrrgggghhh!

Or the fluidity of recall in situations that become very conflicted, such as embedded Family Court struggles.

One cannot believe that the differing descriptions, being carved in acid into the granite of memory, ever were of the same events.

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They've done studies on implanted memories, too.

Ask a kid on repeated occasions about the owl in their room, and pretty soon they believe that there was an owl in their room and will tell the story of it.

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Persistence of false beliefs.

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