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I'm lecturing this week about COVID fake news and how to detect it, and ran into the fascinating story of the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wwii-rumor-clinics
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wwii-rumor-clinics
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During WWII, fake news of all sorts swirled through communities:
A bubonic plague bomb had been dropped on Oregon
No US Navy vessel survived Pearl Harbor.
Interested in quelling this misinformation, FDR created the Office of Wartime Information.
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A bubonic plague bomb had been dropped on Oregon
No US Navy vessel survived Pearl Harbor.
Interested in quelling this misinformation, FDR created the Office of Wartime Information.
(2/n)
In Boston, they worked with a giant in psychology, Gordon Allport, and also Robert Knaff, who had written an early paper on the nature of rumors.
Knaff had some interesting thoughts on where rumors came from. Not all have been supported since.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2745686
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Knaff had some interesting thoughts on where rumors came from. Not all have been supported since.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2745686
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He argued that people turn to rumors when a situation was emotional, important, and ambiguous.
He created a taxonomy of rumors, such as "pipe-dream rumors" and "wedge driving rumors."
You can probably imagine examples of those in the COVID crisis.
(4/n)
He created a taxonomy of rumors, such as "pipe-dream rumors" and "wedge driving rumors."
You can probably imagine examples of those in the COVID crisis.
(4/n)
Knaff and Allport's clinic put these principles into practice. They also created some delightfully WWII marketing materials.
But one of their strategies was probably itself misinformed.
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But one of their strategies was probably itself misinformed.
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In one of their central efforts, they created pamphlets naming common rumors, and then dispelling them through factual corrections.
Here's an example:
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Here's an example:
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But subsequent research has established the "illusory truth effect:" we tend to forget where we heard information, such that even untruths bleed into our belief system.
Lots of writing on this, but here's my favorite piece on it by @DanTGilbert
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-17453-001
(7/n)
Lots of writing on this, but here's my favorite piece on it by @DanTGilbert
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-17453-001
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One side effect of illusory truth is the "backfire effect:" even when we new information is *explicitly labeled* as untrue, people sometimes later find it familiar, and thus believable.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1075547015613523
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5547702/
(8/n)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1075547015613523
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5547702/
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We now know more about what works in counteracting fake news: such as crowdsourcing and elevating reliable sources, and asking readers to critically evaluate info as they read it.
@GordPennycook and @DG_Rand have a great recent piece on this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/opinion/fake-news-social-media.html
(9/n)
@GordPennycook and @DG_Rand have a great recent piece on this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/opinion/fake-news-social-media.html
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There are few new ideas under the sun; it's not surprising that psychologists have been working on this problem for decades.
It's interesting to see how our thinking has developed, and also urges caution: our beliefs about false beliefs will likely continue to evolve.
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It's interesting to see how our thinking has developed, and also urges caution: our beliefs about false beliefs will likely continue to evolve.
(10/n)
