The Illusory Truth Effect: How Millions of Americans Were Duped by Russiagate
“Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia
Conspiracy”, read the front page headline of a New York Times
paper from March 2019.
Bit by bit, mainstream American consciousness
slowly came to terms with the death of the thrilling conspiracy theory that the
highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and with
the stark reality that the mass media and the Democratic Party spent the last two
and-a-half years monopolizing public attention with a narrative which never had any
underlying truth to it.
There are still holdouts, of course. Many people
invested a tremendous amount of hope, credibility, and egoic currency in the belief
that Robert Mueller was going to arrest high-ranking Trump administration officials
and members of Trump’s own family, leading seedy characters to
“flip” on the president in their own self-interest and thereby providing
evidence that will lead to impeachment.
Some insisted that Attorney General William Barr
is holding back key elements of the Mueller report, a claim which is premised on the
absurd belief that Mueller would allow Barr to lie about the results of the
investigation without speaking up publicly. Others are still holding out hope that
other investigations by other legal authorities will turn up some Russian
shenanigans that Mueller could not, ignoring Mueller’s sweeping subpoena
powers and unrivaled investigative authority. But they’re coming around.
The question still remains, though: what
happened? How did a fact-free conspiracy theory come to gain so much traction among
mainstream Americans? How were millions of people persuaded to invest hope in a
narrative that anyone objectively analyzing the facts knew to be completely false?
The answer is that they were told that the
Russiagate narrative was legitimate over and over again by politicians and mass
media pundits, and, because of a peculiar phenomenon in the nature of human
cognition, this repetition made it seem true.
The rather uncreatively-named illusory truth
effect describes the way people are more likely to believe something is true after
hearing it said many times. This is due to the fact that the familiar feeling we
experience when hearing something we’ve heard before feels very similar to our
experience of knowing that something is true.
When we hear a familiar idea, its familiarity
provides us with something called cognitive ease, which is the relaxed, unlabored
state we experience when our minds aren’t working hard at something. We also
experience cognitive ease when we are presented with a statement that we know to be
true.
We have a tendency to select for cognitive ease,
which is why confirmation bias is a thing; believing ideas which don’t cause
cognitive strain or dissonance gives us more cognitive ease than doing otherwise.
Our evolutionary ancestors adapted to seek out cognitive ease so that they could put
their attention into making quick decisions essential for survival, rather than
painstakingly mulling over whether everything we believe is as true as we think it
is.
This was great for not getting eaten by saber-
toothed tigers in prehistoric times, but it’s not very helpful when navigating
the twists and turns of a cognitively complex modern world. It’s also not
helpful when you’re trying to cultivate truthful beliefs while surrounded by
screens that are repeating the same bogus talking points over and over again.
If you want to understand how the mass media
duped millions into believing the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the
US government, research the illusory truth effect, the phenomenon which causes people to
mistake repeated assertions for truth.
Science has been aware of the illusory truth
effect since 1977, when a study found that subjects were more likely to
evaluate a statement as true when it’s been repeatedly presented to them over
the course of a couple of weeks, even if they didn’t consciously remember
having encountered that statement before. These findings have been replicated in
numerous studies since, and new research in recent years has shown that the
phenomenon is even more drastic than initially believed.
A 2015 paper titled “Knowledge Does Not Protect
Against Illusory Truth” found that the illusory truth effect is so
strong that sheer repetition can change the answers that test subjects give, even
when they had been in possession of knowledge contradicting that answer beforehand.
This study was done to test the assumption which had gone unchallenged up until then
that the illusory truth effect only comes into play when there is no stored
knowledge of the subject at hand.
“Surprisingly, repetition increased
statements’ perceived truth, regardless of whether stored knowledge could have
been used to detect a contradiction,” the paper reads. “Reading
a statement like ‘A sari is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by
Scots’ increased participants’ later belief that it was true, even if
they could correctly answer the question ‘What is the name of the short
pleated skirt worn by Scots?’”
Stored knowledge tells pretty much everybody that
the “short, pleated skirt worn by Scots” is a kilt, not a sari, but
simply repeating the contrary statement can convince them otherwise.
This explains why we all know people who are
extraordinarily intelligent, but still bought into the Russiagate narrative just as
much as our less mentally apt friends and acquaintances. Their intelligence
didn’t save them from this debunked conspiracy theory, it just made them more
clever in finding ways of defending it. This is because the illusory truth effect
largely bypasses the intellect, and even one’s own stored knowledge, because
of the way we all reflexively select for cognitive ease.
Another study titled “Incrimination
through innuendo: Can media questions become public answers?” found
that subjects can be manipulated into believing an allegation simply by exposure to
innuendo or incriminating questions in news media headlines. Questions like, for
example, “What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?
”, printed by New York Magazine in July of 2018.
You can understand, then, how a populace who is
consuming repetitive assertions, innuendo, and incriminating questions on a daily
basis through the screens that they look at many times a day could be manipulated
into believing that Robert Mueller would one day reveal evidence which will lead to
the destruction of the Trump administration.
The repetition leads to belief, the belief leads
to trust, and before you know it people who are scared of the president are reading
the Palmer Report every day and parking themselves in front of Rachel
Maddow every night and letting everything they say slide right past their skepticism
filters, marinating comfortably in a sedative of cognitive ease.
And that repetition has been no accident.
CNN producer John Bonifield was caught on video nearly two years ago
admitting that CNN’s CEO Jeff Zucker was personally instructing his
staff to stay focused on Russia even in the midst of far more important breaking
news stories.
Jeff Zucker
“My boss, I shouldn’t say this, my
boss yesterday we were having a discussion about this dental shoot and he goes and
he was just like I want you to know what we are up against here,”
Bonifield told an undercover associate of James O’Keefe’s Project
Veritas.
“And he goes, just to give you some
context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half
we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN said in our internal meeting, he
said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with it,
let’s get back to Russia.”
(CNN said in a statement that the video
was legitimate and disputed none of its content, saying only that it stands by
Bonifield and that “Diversity of personal opinion is what makes CNN
strong, we welcome it and embrace it.”)
Zucker, for his part, told the New York
Times in an article that he was “entirely comfortable” with
CNN’s role in promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory the way that
it did.
“We are not investigators. We are
journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly
what we did,” Zucker said. “A sitting president’s own
Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation.
That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because
it’s unprecedented.”
“We are not investigators”?
What is that? So it’s not your job to investigate whether what you’re
reporting is true or false? It’s not your job to investigate whether the
anonymous sources you’re basing your reports on might be lying or not?
It’s not your job to investigate whether or not you’d be committing
journalistic malpractice with the multiple completely fake stories your outlet has
been humiliated by in the last two years? It’s not your job to weigh the
consequences of deliberately monopolizing public attention on a narrative which
consists of nothing but confident-sounding assertions and innuendo?
“We are not investigators.”
So? You’re not dentists or firefighters either, what’s your point? That
has nothing to do with the mountains of journalistic malpractice you’ve been
perpetrating by advancing this conspiracy theory, nor with the inexcusable
brutalization you’ve been inflicting upon the American psyche with your
deliberate nonstop repetition of bogus assertions, innuendo, and incriminating
questions.
The science of modern propaganda has been in
research and development for over a century. If you think about how many advances
have been made in other military fields over the last hundred years, that gives you
a clear example of how sophisticated an understanding the social engineers must now
have of the methods of mass manipulation of human psychology. We may be absolutely
certain that there are people who’ve been working to drive the public
narratives about western rivals like Russia, and that they are doing so with a far
greater understanding of the concepts we’ve touched on in this essay than we
have at our disposal.
The manipulators understand our psyches better
than we understand them ourselves, and they’re getting more clever, not less.
The only thing we can do to keep our heads while immersed in a society that is
saturated with propaganda is be as relentlessly honest as possible, with ourselves
and with the world. We’ll never be able to out-manipulate the master
manipulators, but we can be real with ourselves about whether or not we’re
selecting for cognitive ease rather than thinking rigorously and clearly. We can be
truthful with our friends, family, coworkers and social media followers wherever
untruth seems to be taking hold. We can do our very best to shine the light of truth
on the puppeteers wherever we spot them and ruin the whole goddamn show for
everyone.
It may not seem like a lot, but truth is the one
thing they can’t manipulate, whether it’s truth about them, truth about
the world, or truthfulness with yourself. The lying manipulators got us into this
mess, so only truth can get us out.
yogaesoteric
February 13, 2020