Blog #11

EOTO #2 Reflection: Illusory Truth Effect

The EOTO presentation specifically on the topic of the Illusory Truth Effect was most interesting to me.  I had never heard of the name of this effect, but I know that I see it all the time in the media and when talking amongst my friends and family.  I think that it is super scary that we can trick ourselves into thinking something was true, solely based on repetition and the constant word of mouth that we share amongst each other.  It is startling to see how the evolution of this effect has truly taken off, and sense it hasn't gone away yet, I think it will be prominent in human society forever.

The Illusory Truth Effect was first discovered back in 1977.  The study in 1977 showed that most of the test subjects chose certain answers since some of the statements were repeated in comparison to others.  This was fascinating to me, because if this was the situation in 1977, obviously people at the time were conditioned to act this way because they picked up this behavior from the people before them.  Picking the repeating statements was so prominent that it signals to me that this has always been a common trend in our society and it's essentially a habit that has been formed and that will continue to be reinforced throughout generations.  This study may seem harmless, but as we've seen in real life, this effect has serious implications.  For instance, during the presentation Luis asked a question about what we thought the cause of Covid-19 was.  Some of us raised our hands in favor of it being caused by bats and others voted that it was caused by a leak in a laboratory.  I was in favor of it being caused by bats, but Luis enlightened me that neither was a confirmed cause.  This came as a shock, and I realized just how easily it is to be misinformed.  This has led me to question how many other things I am misled by on a daily basis, and I will definitely look more into information before coming to a conclusion and sharing it with others.  It's very hard to know what is true and false, but I think that it's important to make an effort to try to seek the truth from numerous sources, because it is so easy to trick ourselves into going with the information that we see the most.

Everyone pays attention to the news, and we all talk and exchange opinions with one another for the most part, so nobody is excused from the Illusory Truth Effect.  This is alarming, because it's not like certain individuals can be excused and then help others see this problem.  Instead, we are all victims, but I think that if we make it a point to check what we hear from others or what we see on social media or the internet, we should be less exposed to this effect.  This will be especially hard when looking at sources of mainstream media, because a lot of the time these platforms share the same side and sources.  So, we would see the same information repeated and would establish that this is the truth through repetition.  However, maybe if we avoided only using mainstream media and looked to citizen journalists and alternative media, we might have a better chance of not seeing the same false information over and over again.  Those sources would provide alternative opinions so we wouldn't see much repetition, and we wouldn't be able to trick ourselves into solely trusting the repeated information.

We will continue to be misled, if we do not try to find other sources of information on certain topics.  The habit of relying on repetition for the truth will not slow down otherwise, and this would be damaging, because we would continue to walk around misinformed.  I don't want to walk around not knowing what is truly going on in the world, because if we do not know the truth, how can we make changes in certain situations when needed.  Learning about the Illusory Truth Effect has been eye-opening to me, and I hope others realize that we need to prevent our minds from being tainted by the delusion of repeated information, because it is not guaranteed that it is the correct information.  Nobody wants to walk around feeling clueless and making decisions based on false information, so learn to be mindful and take precautions, such as fact checking, so you can be informed correctly!