Deception and the Brain
Shortly after Barack Obama’s campaign launched its Fight the Smears website this month, Joe and I published a piece on Open Left that explored some of the difficulties in dispelling myths and offered ways to overcome them. I also provided some related advice here at hivethrive regarding the hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who challenge conventional wisdom and environmentally harmful practices.
I was pleased to read an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times that adds to this line of analysis. Written by neuroscientists Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, authors of Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life, it offers a number of insights worth considering.
Sam Wang also posted a version of the op-ed on Daily Kos, which enabled him to include links that the New York Times op-ed format did not permit.
The op-ed, entitled “Your Brain Lies to You”, begins with statistics about the prevalence of false beliefs, including the 10 percent of Americans who incorrectly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. It then explains how the functioning of our brains renders us susceptible to misinformation:
“The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.”
The failure to recall the context in which we acquired a piece of information is called “source amnesia.” This also places us at risk of incorrectly recalling as true a statement that was presented to us in the context of a list of myths. At first, we may understand it as a myth, but months later, we are likely to lose the context that defined it as a myth and only remember it as something we read or heard. Aamodt and Wang argue that this process led to the success of the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” during the 2004 presidential campaign, and explains why polls suggest that the group’s smears took time to have an impact on support for John Kerry.
The authors suggest that a memorable, truthful story is a better way to confront misinformation than simply labeling it a myth. In their example, telling the story of Barack Obama’s embrace of Christianity as a young man would serve as an effective means to counter false beliefs about his religion.
This advice makes sense, although we should also recognize its limitations. We shouldn’t expect that we can reach everyone, as Aamodt and Wang point out:
“We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.”
A familiar metaphor holds that there is a “marketplace of ideas” in which ideas that best explain the way the world works naturally outcompete other ideas and come to dominate the market. Wang and Aamodt conclude that this metaphor, which is found in a statement they attribute to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, fails to conform to what we now know about how our brains work. To come closer to the truth, they note, we must become more aware of the brain’s processes and limitations.
I had a chance to hear Sam Wang on the BBC World Service today. After he spoke briefly about the issues addressed in yesterday’s op-ed, the interviewer asked him how he could be sure that the brain was responsible when people remember falsehoods that have been debunked. It wasn’t clear to me what she thought could be responsible for our thinking, if not the brain, and Dr. Wang replied by pointing out that the brain is, after all, where our thought occurs. This is a point that George Lakoff has also made in his work. While it seems self-evident, there is sometimes resistance to the conclusions to which this fact leads, and an unwillingness to acknowledge the ways in which the brain can fail us.
You can find more on Wang and Aamodt’s website, which is also called Welcome to Your Brain.
Evan
