Popular Myths
The CDC recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.”
When Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28% of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40% of the myths as factual.
Younger people did better at first, but 3 days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. People of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.
The new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.
An experiment by Kimberlee Weaver (”Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: A repetitive voice can sound like a chorus“) shows that hearing the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same effect as hearing that thing from many different people — the brain gets tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from multiple, independent sources, even when it has not.
“Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach,” by “Shankar Vedantam