myths, flu and Republicans....

This is my weekly newspaper column, published yesterday. Also available online at:
http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2007/09/07/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis59.txt

Right answers are counterproductive?
By Rich Lewis, September 6, 2007
Last updated: Thursday, September 6, 2007 9:44 AM EDT


One of the most fascinating aspects of human behavior is the way that we cling to myths.
I mean, everybody knows that your hair and fingernails keep growing after you die, right? And that George Washington had wooden teeth?
Actually, both of those “facts” are wrong - and, according to some new psychological research discussed in the Washington Post this week, I've just helped keep those two whoppers alive and well.
The story by the Post's Shankar Vedantam highlights recent work by researchers led by Norbert Schwarz, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
“The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information,” Vedantam writes. “But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.”
In other words, debunking a myth can actually strengthen it.
Several related Schwarz studies are available online. They are eye openers.
For example, Schwarz and his colleagues showed a group of people a flyer entitled “Flu Vaccine: Facts & Myths,” published by the federal Centers for Disease Control.
The flyer lists six statements about flu vaccines - with three labeled “true” (such as, “People can die from the flu”) and three labeled “false” (such as, “You must get a flu vaccine before December”).
Another group of people were shown an altered version of the flyer that only presented the true facts, left out the myths and had no labels.
Here's what happened: Right after reading the original CDC flyer, the researchers write, “The subjects had good memory for the presented information and made only a few random errors, identifying 4 percent of the myths as true and 3 percent of the facts as false.”
That's great - the “educational” effort worked, right?
Well, no.
“Thirty minutes later, however, their judgments showed a systematic error pattern: They now misidentified 15 percent of the myths as true, whereas their misidentification of facts as false remained at 2 percent,” the study says.
After that half-hour, older participants, aged 71-86, misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. And three days later, the seniors identified 40 percent of the myths as facts.
The younger participants, aged 18-25, did better after 30 minutes - but, as Vedantam writes, “Three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.”
Both the people who read the original flyer and those who read the altered flyer had a more favorable attitude toward getting flu shots right after reading.
But a mere 30 minutes later, the researchers write, the “Facts & Myth” flyer “facilitated acceptance of myths as facts, impaired participants' attitudes toward vaccination, and undermined their vaccination intentions, relative to controls who read no flyer at all” or who read the altered flyer.
In short, the CDC flyer had exactly the opposite of the intended effect: It made people less likely, not more likely, to get a flu shot.
The researchers say the reason for this is that people can remember statements a long time after they heard or read them, but quickly forget the context in which the statements appeared.
When public information campaigns confront myths with facts, or warn people that a given claim is false, they make the mistake of repeating the information they want to discredit.
As a result, they write, “When the false claims are encountered again on a later occasion, all that is left may be the vague feeling that ‘I heard something like this before.'”
What is worse, they remember hearing it from a “reputable source,” the CDC!
This is a very useful warning to parents, teachers, public service organizations and anyone else who is trying to root out myths that work against their goals.
As the researchers put it: “Any attempt to explicitly discredit false information necessarily involves a repetition of the false information, which may contribute to its later familiarity and acceptance.”
The research may also help to explain why national Republicans have been so enormously successful in recent years in selling their ideas to voters while Democrats have been such dismal failures.
The Republican strategy in general is to make bold claims that may or may not be true - and the Democratic mistake has been to take the bait and try to debunk the claims by repeating them and debating them.
As Vedantam writes: “This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.”
Much has been written in recent years about how good the Republican Party is at “framing” the issues and inventing slogans and catch-phrases compared to Democrats. And that's true.
But Republicans also understand what Schwarz' research finds: Making straightforward assertions, sticking to your talking points and ignoring what your opponents say will beat refuting, explaining and debating every time.
It's not a particularly attractive conclusion given our belief that wise decisions flow from public debate, but it may be the only practical approach to winning.
And that's no myth.

Rich Lewis' e-mail address is:
rlcolumn@comcast.net.