In an article in Crikey
(paywall), Noel Turnbull asks why we believe so much that’s wrong: "One
of the great conundrums of modern life is how so many people have come
to believe so much that is just plain wrong." He goes through some fun
facts, such as the research that showed that the more you watch Fox
News, the more ignorant you become. This reminded me of a claim about
human cognition I encountered back when I was a student: it's easier to
accept new facts than to discard old ones.
I don't remember who
wrote the book, but it was someone famous and I think it was about the
development of the GSW electroweak theory. The above claim was followed
with this example: when Chadwick discovered the neutron, nuclear
physicists readily accepted the existence of the new particle, but had
trouble disposing of the notion that the nucleus contained electrons
(because they were observed in beta decay). In other words, whoever
tells their story first has a big advantage.
We see this phenomenon all the time in those emails that circulate with amazing stories, the kind of thing that Snopes
is devoted to debunking. A typical exchange might be, for example,
that Alice forwards to Bob an email claiming that (US President) Barack
Obama was born in Kenya, and therefore ineligible for the Presidency.
Bob expresses some doubt over the quality of the email's contents, to
which Alice's inevitable reply is "How do you know it's not true?". Bob
then resorts to plausibility arguments and/or scouring the web for
contradictory evidence, when the real question is, why did Alice ever
think it was true in the first place?
So long as a new fact
doesn't obviously contradict something we already think we know, we
accept it easily and incorporate it into our worldview. When shaping
public opinion, the first to act therefore has a big advantage. This
might be why, when we have unprecedented access to information, it is so
easy to be mis-informed. The human brain makes it impossible for
de-bunkers to keep pace with the bunkum.
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