The Blue Notebook

Last month the Washington Post reported on research indicating that information campaigns which try to counter commonly held misconceptions may actually serve to reinforce them. (Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach, by Shankar Vedantam, 9/4/2007).

I find this maddening in the extreme, but on further reflection don’t know why I should be surprised. I claim it’s possible to convince people with words that acting locally and thinking globally is in their own best interests, but it’s clear that I’m going to need more than a trip to the Blarney Stone to reach that buried part of the human brain where we manufacture our contrary-to-fact conclusions and then hold on to them for dear life.  

I got my hopes up at first when it became clear that the design of the study might have had something to do with the intial result. They used a recent Center for Disease Control brochure titled Flu Vaccine Facts and Myths that, from an information delivery standpoint, has several strikes agains it:

• The myths are short, they’re presented first, and they’re in zippy orange type
• The truth sections are in understated blue type and often run to four or more lines
• The first truth section is actually seven lines long and contains a number of large-number statistics–deadly!

It seems obvious the subjects would remember the punchy orange one-liners that are comfortingly familiar, and not the boring fine print that brings back bad memories of high school civics class.

It would be so easy to re-do this brochure and make it more effective. For example, don’t even mention the myth, was my first thought. But the social psychologists have looked into that one too, and found that when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true. (Peter Kim, Journal of Applied Psychology; full citation needed.)

The sad fact is that, as questionable as the results of this particular study might be, the results (according to the Washington Post article) have been confirmed over and over in other more carefully designed studies.

Actually, I knew this already. About six months ago I read a wonderful book called A Mind of It’s Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, by Cordelia Fine. Essentially a survey of the literature in experimental psychology, the book has chapters with titles like “The Vain Brain,” “The Emotional Brain,” and, yes, “The Deluded Brain.”  And ever since reading the book, when I run into yet another example of incomprehensible human behavior, I have to remember that there is a mountain of experimental evidence out there to confirm that, yes folks, we do indeed (for example) hold on to the truth only if it is convenient to do so.

I’ll write more about this book in a separate post.

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