ONE Believing Things That Are Not True: A Cognitive Science Perspective on Misinformation

Abstract

One of these rather silly anecdotes is an actual news story: some newer Canadian hundreddollar bills smell like maple syrup; England is considering issuing a coin featuring the pop band One Direction; the U.S. Treasury recently introduced Perry the Pyramid, a terrifying oneeyed mascot for the dollar. Choosing the real story was the task of a college student who called into the “Bluff the Listener” game on the National Public Radio program Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! (Danforth, 2013). He won the game by correctly selecting the true but rather obscure story about scented Canadian currency. How did the listener make this choice, given it was unlikely he had the relevant information in mind to make that decision? In this chapter, we review cognitive strategies and heuristics people use when deciding whether something is true. Our approach to understanding this issue is an experimental one, with the goal of isolating particular mechanisms that contribute to illusions of truth and the propagation of falsehoods. Many of the misconceptions covered in this volume are powerful precisely because they result from combinations of mental processes; there is not one simple trick to convincing people that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, that climate change is a hoax, or that other claims percolating through mass media are unsupported. Here, we consider how statements can be manipulated to seem more truthful than they are, why people unwittingly trust information from sources they initially knew to be unreliable, and how certain features of claims Believing Things That Are not True: A Cognitive science Perspective on Misinformation