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Loading ...I recently heard a conversation on the radio show “On The Media” with Washington Post journalist Shankar Vedantam called “The Truth of False”.
I found this to be an incredibly interesting topic and shows the power of positive conversation. Not in the “fluffy” way, but in directing the attention to a positive statement about a subject. This is ultimately the most powerful approach to “winning the minds” of the people.
I decided to pull out the important snippets of the discussion:
BOB GARFIELD: Americans may or may not be as sleep-deprived as drug makers claim, but if it were a myth you could try to quash it with the truth. That’s what the Centers for Disease Control Prevention recently did. They sent out a flyer listing various facts and myths about the flu vaccine and labeled them “true or false.” But a study at the University of Michigan found that the CDC flyer actually did nothing to change people’s minds and may have even spread vaccine myths to more people.
Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for The Washington Post, explains that right after reading the flyer, people mostly remembered the false statements as false.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: But about 30 minutes later, older people started to remember some of the false statements as true, and three days later, very large numbers of older people and significant numbers of younger people also started remembering increasing numbers of myths as true.
The true statements did not suffer the same kind of deterioration with time. In other words, over time we tend to remember false things as true but not true things as false.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, if I understand your piece, when people hear a statement involving a negative - let’s say Saddam was not connected to 9/11 - and they hear it often enough, somehow the “not” disappears.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: That’s right. What happens, unfortunately, is our denial of the myth ends up repeating the myth and makes the myth itself more accessible to people’s memory. And furthermore, as the separate study that you note points out, what happens very often is that the “not” in the sentence essentially falls off with time in many people’s memories.
Then they go on to talk about a second study that further emphasizes the point.
BOB GARFIELD:…But there’s another study that suggests that if you are, in fact, predisposed to have a certain world view that misinformation sticks still more. Can you describe it?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There’s a new study that’s just been completed by Jason Reifler at Georgia State University where he actually looks at questions such as why it is that large numbers of people continue to believe that weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq before the invasion or even found in Iraq after the invasion.
And what Jason and his colleagues did was try and give people the correct information. And what he found, ironically, is that partisans who wanted to believe that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, when told about the correct information, ended up believing ever more fervently that they were right and that the correct information was wrong.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: ….And so presenting [them] with the correct information, which, by the way, is our government’s strategy of combating myths and disinformation, does not seem to be a very effective approach.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One thing that I should mention, Bob, is that when you’re trying to deny a falsehood, perhaps the most effective way of doing that is by not mentioning the original falsehood at all.
In other words, if someone said that Bob Garfield is for child prostitution, the right response is not Bob Garfield is not for child prostitution, but, rather, to say Bob Garfield is an upstanding journalist who believes in the finest tenets of journalism and runs a very popular show that’s heard widely by many millions of people around the world.
There you have it!!! Keep the truth to the truth and make sure the false is always the truth not the truth in opposition to the false; make it so the false is the truth….come on everyone join the bandwagon!!!
Filed under: Brand Protection, Brand Reputation, Crisis Management, Hearts and Minds, Managing Conversation, Marketing Language, Memetic Engineering, Messaging Online, Online Attack, Online Brand Promotion, Online Brand Protection, Online Brand Reputation, Online Branding, Propaganda, Propaganda Warfare, Reputation Management
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[…] Harrison executive, Saul Wainwright, brought an amazing radio news article to my attention, The Truth of False, which addresses what I have known forever: the truth is always what people […]