The Fact of My Ignorance

I’m finally catching up on articles I’ve been meaning to write for a long time and this one comes from a New York Times Op-Ed piece which was written last June but which I discovered more recently.  It can be found here. It describes a phenomenon known as “source amnesia”, which serves as yet another example of how none of us are nearly as smart, objective, or discerning as we think we are.

Most basically, source amnesia is just the idea that its much easier to remember a particular nugget of information, than it is to remember the context or source of that information, especially if its information we use, think about, or hear often.  For example where did you first learn that the gas pedal was on the right and the brake on the left?  Or where did you first hear that smoking causes lung cancer?  You’ve probably heard it plenty of times from lots of reputable sources but can you name one of those sources with surety?  Unless you’ve read something in the last few days your mind has probably long stripped away any memory of where you got that information or the context you heard it in, and now just stores it in the part of the brain where it stores “facts”.

The interesting thing is that your brain, in transfering this memory to its “fact bin” often strips out very important context, including whether or not that particular item is true or false, or whether it comes from a reliable or unreliable source.  I’ve long-since learned that its very difficult to memorize negative associations like “T-cells are NOT part of the innate immune system” because when test time comes, more often than not I’m only able to remember that T-cells and the innate immune system were somehow related in my studying and I’m not able to tell whether or not T-cells were or were not part of this system, which is usually the fact I actually need to know.  So I’ve stuck to memorizing only positive associations “T-cells ARE part of the adaptive immune system” because then when I remember there’s an association I can be confident its a positive one.

Well political pundits and partisan news organizations are aware of this little brain snafu and take advantage of it on a regular basis.  News headlines are particularly problematic.  Because of source amnesia the following three headlines:

Obama is a Muslim

Obama is not a Muslim

Is Obama a Muslim?

…are pretty much all stored in our brains in the same exact way.  Just a sourceless association between Obama and Muslims.  And because the source and context of these little factoids are stripped away more severely the more often we hear an association the proportion of people who believe (in this example) that Barack Obama is a Muslim has less to do with the content of any of the articles discussing the matter and more to do with the volume of articles that mention his name and Muslims in close proximity to each-other.

The New Yorker ran a controversial cover at the beginning of last July featuring Barack Obama and his wife dressed as militant Muslims which was supposed to be satirical.  It sparked a new interest into the subject of Obama’s faith and several news agencies ran articles looking into the Muslim connection, each one, of course, finding the idea that Obama was a Muslim to be rubbish.  And yet over the course of that month the percent of Americans who believed he was a Muslim had actually risen to 12%! Up from 10% previously. As it turns out remembering that “Obama is NOT a muslim” is about as difficult as remembering that “T-cells are NOT part of the innate immune system.”  After a while all you have left is the association which only gets reinforced the more often its brought up.

The picture I started this article with is another good example.  Hillary Clinton’s camp released it during the primary knowing full well that it doesn’t matter whether this picture is run with an article supporting (where there even any of these?) or debunking the idea that Obama is a Muslim.  And it doesn’t matter whether it’s seen in the National Enquirer or the LA Times.  The source and context will be forgotten and all that will be remembered is the image of Obama in Muslim dress.  And the more often that picture is shown the more people will associate Obama and Muslims in their minds.

Those who listen to talk radio or frequently watch cable news editorial shows can probably easily identify those times when these pundits are consciously using this technique.  They tend to use certain phrases frequently, associating their enemies with all things bad.  Over time, if you are a frequent listener/viewer these associations are pounded so far into your head that they become firmly rooted in the “fact” area of your brain and you completely forget that the only place you’ve heard them is from an uneducated, partisan, clearly-biased entertainer.  In fact a study on source amnesia at Stanford which was cited in this NYT op-ed, found that the more often someone hears a statement, the more likely they are to attribute that statement to a reputable source:

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Thus to our brains repetition=credibility.  And when we’ve heard/read/thought about something enough, we often believe we got it from a credible source, even if we never did.  This is another one of those quick and dirty shortcuts our brains use that are correct more often than not.  I mean generally speaking, the more often you hear something, the more correct it is, especially if you hear it from multiple unrelated sources.  But obviously repetition from a source with little or no credibility, or repetition over and over from the same source doesn’t make a statement any more true.  And our brain really doesn’t take those things into account.

So what does that mean?  Political pundits who frequently use repetitive statements or slogans, or who spend an inordinate amount of time discussing false accusations against their political enemies are literally trying to brainwash you.  And news organizations who frequently use headlines consisting of a controversial statement in the form of a question (Is Barack Obama a communist?  Is John McCain too old to be President?) or who, once again, spend large amounts of time dwelling on false accusations before finally debunking them at the very end of the article are stoking your fear and anger, and in the end, misinforming you for all practical purposes.

I don’t think merely knowing about source amnesia allows you to prevent it in any way.  But knowing how its abused can help you identify those that are taking advantage of it, and avoid them.  Knowing about source amnesia can also encourage us to question those “facts” that we believe we know.  Which doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands in frustration, but maybe it will help us approach our political discussions with a little more humility. Because even those things that we think are common knowledge, or which we vaguely remember learning from credible sources, may very well be false.

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