The Dangerous Mind Twister
Propaganda's Secret Weapon
REPEAT, Repeat, Repeat, repeat, repeat....
You know it's a lie, then you keep hearing it over and over, and the repetition will twist your mind.
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”
A law of propaganda: Nazi Joseph Goebbels.
Research experiments conducted by social scientists help illustrate why it’s so insidious for President Trump and his congressional defenders to keep parroting the debunked conspiracy theory, which originated with Russian intelligence agencies, that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
People who are repeatedly exposed to the same false information, even if they’re initially told that it is false, feel fewer qualms sharing it on social media after each additional time they see it. In five experiments involving more than 2,500 Americans, Daniel Effron, who teaches organizational behavior at the London Business School, and Medha Raj, a PhD student at the University of Southern California, documented how seeing a fake headline just once leads individuals to temper their disapproval of the misinformation when they see it a second, third or fourth time. They outline their findings in the new edition of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. [Washington Post, 12/4/19]
This strange bit in our brains happens even when the lie is overwhelmingly obvious.
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