Is what you believe a lie? The Illusory Truth Effect.

MIMH - Musings in My Head

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Is what you believe a lie? The Illusory Truth Effect.

You can never be too sure. Stay open-minded.

Francis Sani

Jun 20, 2021

Hey,

I hope you’re doing okay. We’re close to the middle of the year. If you’re like me, you probably feel like the year has gone by too fast. You wonder if you’ve achieved all you wanted to.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on all the little wins we’ve had this year. There are so many of them. Let’s appreciate them and not focus on the things we’re yet to achieve.

All that is meant to happen will happen in due time.

Stay Jiggy.

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"When a “fact” tastes good and is repeated enough, we tend to believe it, no matter how false it may be. Understanding the illusory truth effect can keep us from being bamboozled." — Shane Parrish.

I recently came across the concept of the Illusory Truth Effect.

It is essentially the phenomenon where repeating a statement increases the belief that it is true when the statement is actually false.

Most of us will naturally think that we know better. That we are able to sift between the information that we get exposed to and easily identify what is true and what is not.

On average, false stories reach 1,500 people six times faster than true stories do — Science journal

We have to make about 35,000 decisions each day. That's a lot of decisions and our brain optimizes to reduce the amount of cognitive load on our brains as much as possible.

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Like I discussed last week with the deep dive on how we're subconscious 95% of the time, this results in a situation where we do things without being fully aware of them.

This makes it easy for us to fail in situations where we are faced with the illusory truth effect.

If I set up a Twitter account, acquire 100 active followers and tweet this statement every day for 1 month: Earthquakes happen in Australia every week.

At the end of that month, there's a high likelihood that more than 50% of my active followers will respond yes if they're asked if earthquakes happen in Australia every week.

“The sad truth is the truth is sad.” - Lemony Snicket

If I included a false fact in this letter every week for 1 month, you're likely to think it's true.

The weird thing is that this happens even for statements that we know are wrong before we were exposed to these repeated false statements. If we are exposed for long enough to the lies, we would believe them over the truths we know.

I find this concept important to be aware of. One thing it does for me is that it reminds me that we should not always be insistent on certain statements and beliefs but remember that there's always room for error. Especially when the source of those statements is subjective.

We've all found ourselves in situations where we were very insistent on something in an argument only to be humbled when the facts were revealed

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It also highlights the importance of staying open-minded and searching for information by ourselves. There's a possibility that some of the beliefs and learnings that we learnt during our childhood/adolescence were illusory truths.

Don't be ready to bet your prized possessions or your life on a fact that you're not sure of. No matter how long you've believed it to be true. You might be shocked that it's an illusion.