![]() Would it affect our existing knowledge? They used paired true and un-true statements, but also split their items according to how likely participants were to know the truth (so "The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth" is an example of a "known" items, which also happens to be true, and "The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth" is an un-true item, for which people are likely to know the actual truth). Recently, a team led by Lisa Fazio of Vanderbilt University set out to test how the illusion of truth effect interacts with our prior knowledge. Even if a lie sounds plausible, why would you set what you know aside just because you heard the lie repeatedly? If you really could make a lie sound true by repetition, there'd be no need for all the other techniques of persuasion. And if you look around yourself, you may start to think that everyone from advertisers to politicians are taking advantage of this foible of human psychology.īut a reliable effect in the lab isn't necessarily an important effect on people's real-world beliefs. So, here, captured in the lab, seems to be the source for the saying that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. The key finding is that people tend to rate items they've seen before as more likely to be true, regardless of whether they are true or not, and seemingly for the sole reason that they are more familiar. ![]() Sometimes these items are true (like that one), but sometimes participants see a parallel version which isn't true (something like "A date is a dried plum").Īfter a break – of minutes or even weeks – the participants do the procedure again, but this time some of the items they rate are new, and some they saw before in the first phase. ![]() Here's how a typical experiment on the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like "A prune is a dried plum". Among psychologists something like this known as the "illusion of truth" effect. “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |