Blog: Psychology

The Bush administration has been remarkably successful at spreading false information simply by repeating it over and over. And according to a few recent psychological studies reported in the Washington Post, even if the false information is being labeled false on a flyer or being debunked by a public official, just repeating the statement to rebut it can actually reinforce it in people's minds.

In a nation built on free speech, and where civil libertarians are fond of saying that "the solution to bad speech is more speech," these findings illuminate the difficulty of fighting misinformation. Appropriately, two days ago the Yale Law Journal ran a set of online articles discussing ways to fight Internet harassment such as the defamatory material on AutoAdmit.com that roiled the law school community last year.

Most of the Yale Law Journal articles suggest regulation such as imposing notice-and-takedown rules on search engines, but none of the proposed solutions would really fix the problem, and James Grimmelmann argues against censoring search engines, effectively and rightly in my opinion. The Post article suggests a few better ways to argue without repeating the false information, like "Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11" rather than "Saddam Hussein did not attack us, Bin Laden did", but acknowledges that such transformations may not be possible.

In both cases, we're still stuck with the problem that it's easier to anonymously defame someone than for the victim to clear his or her name, and it's easier to mislead the American public than to stand up for the truth.

Getting deeper into The Wisdom of Crowds... Surowiecki discusses the "Ultimatum Game" where two people are placed in a room and one, randomly assigned to be player A, is given ten $1 bills and must split them in some proportion (equal, unequal, whatever) with player B. Player B then gets to choose to accept the deal, in which case each of them keep their amount of money, or reject the deal, in which case neither gets any money.

The economic game theory ideal, the perfectly rational actor, would as player A choose to give $1 to B and keep $9. B would then have to choose between keeping $1 and getting nothing, and therefore take the deal. (There's a classic game theory problem often assigned in economics classes involving five pirates).

In real life, most player B's will reject offers of $1 or $3 even though it is not in their rational best interest to do so, because they perceive it as unfair. And most player A's, even without knowing the player B, will offer a fifty-fifty split.

I already knew that stuff. What I didn't know, and is fascinating, is that this only holds when the roles of A and B are randomly selected. If the players are told that A performed better on a test, then the player A's offer less money and the B's overwhelmingly accept their offers. If people have any reason, even an irrelevant one, to believe that one person is "better" than the other, their insistence on fairness goes out the window.