Tell Me Lies

by digby

As we hurtle forward into GOP smear season, this article in this week-end’s NY Times magazine may help us explain how these character assassinations damage Democrats so successfully:

…To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.

The rule obviously invites many opportunities for error. The seniors in Skurnik’s study couldn’t remember the context in which they had heard the health claims (research shows that we are quick to forget “negation tags,” like whether something is said to be false or a lie), so they relied, instead, on a vague sense of familiarity, which steered them astray. Repetition, psychologists have shown, easily tricks us. Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Tech recently found that if one person tells you that something is true many times, you are likely to conclude that the opinion is widely held, even if no one else said a thing about it.

The right has been on top of this for decades now, repeating lies about Democrats over and over again until everyone just accepts them as true. The mainstream media as often as not apply Cokie’s Law and run with it too. (It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s “out there.”) From candidate smears to “tax and spend” to “unamerican” they repeat it like a bunch of wind up dolls until people have internalized it and don’t even know why they believe it, they just do.

I don’t have any answers, and neither does the article. Indeed, it suggests that his may be getting worse rather than better, with the advent of the internet. (As this article shows, the right is still at it and achieving amazing success with chain emails.) They are like machines with this stuff and the left has never found an adequate way of combating it. It’s very difficult.

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