The Illusory Truth Effect and Women’s Day
The Week That Went By #3
The Illusory Truth Effect
Last week I was on a vacation, swigging a chilled beer by the beach, when I got a call from a friend.
“Heard?”, he asked
“What”?
“Huh! You didn’t hear”?
Then he went on to describe what had happened. His story went something like this —
A girl was standing outside a prominent mall in the city with her family. They had come out of the movies.
Five men of a particular religion walked up to them and informed they “need to take the girl away for two hours”.
The Family protested, and threatened to go to the police.
The men laughed it off, said “cops won’t do anything”.
They took the girl, raped her, and dropped her back in two hours.
I was taken aback, as anyone would be. I asked him if he was sure.
He said he had it ‘verified’ from ‘credible’ folks. To back it up, he sent a pic of a letter. The letter was sent by the mall administration to the police reporting the incident.
As the initial shock settled, some intuition of logic started to kick in.
Isn’t this too incredulous to be true?
I don’t mean to say that more outrageous things don’t happen in our country. But, we don't treat them as everyday triviality.
A quick glance at an official looking letter, addressed to the police, would seem to back up the incident my friend told me about. I still went through the contents of the letter.
As it turned out, sure, it was in fact a complaint to the police.
But..
‘About spreading of false information, and fake incidents to create disharmony’.
In effect, he was claiming one thing. And, sharing the opposite as evidence.
Now, I don’t blame him. He was amongst one of fifty such individuals who did the same on various whatsapp groups I was part of. Each one also had a personal story. How one’s ‘friend’ knows the person to whom this happened, or someone’s sister in law’s friend was there outside the mall when this happened and so on.
It seemed like everyone wanted a personal stake in the incident.
By the end of the day every whatsapp group turned into a forwarding machine. The same story, the same letter, followed by forwarded messages — “verified”, “its true”, “verified by me”, “personally verified”, “yes, it happened”, all with the ‘forwarded multiple times’ tag on top.
Cass Sunstien, the behavioral economist, most famous for co-authoring ‘Nudge’, just came out with a new book. As part of his book tour, he was on the ‘Making Sense’ podcast last week.
Consider this:
MS Dhoni hails from Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand. After the political debacle in Jharkhand, where the Chief Minister was arrested for corruption, MS Dhoni has expressed his desire to involve himself in politics, and run for elections. After retiring from cricket, given his unique position, he wants to pursue public service in the second innings of his life.
Now, all this seems plausible. Except I just made this up.
Didn’t some of you believe it to be true?
In the book (and the podcast), Cass Sunstein refers to the idea of Illusory Truth Effect. Which simply is — any lie, if repeated enough times, is considered true. Cass had given a similar example while explaining the phenomena.
This happens is for a few reasons.
Easier Truthier — Any statement which sounds easy to believe seems truer than not. I gave five reasons in the story why it makes total sense for Dhoni to run for elections.
Pre-existing Biases — Any statement that confirms our preexisting biases and doesn’t challenge our belief system will always seem truer. (Consider the above incident outside the mall. What was your first instinct?)
True statements — Accepting any statement as true is easier, than accepting any statement as false. 2+2 = 4 is an easier statement to accept, than denying 2+2 = 5. It takes an extra second of mental adjustment to claim false. (This was Sam Harris adding to Cass’s point)
aka Illusory Truth Effect
Back to the story my friend told me —
It’s been a week since the story played out over Whatsapp. It served as a handy ice-breaker at various third rate social events and bar conversations. But no mainstream news channel reported it. At a time when most mainstream news channels masquerade Whatsapp forwards and celebrity tweets as news. And for an incident as politically sensitive as this, no political party picked it up officially. The official police handle also confirmed the story as ‘Fake’.
But, in the minds of Whatsapp readers, the story is etched. It’s difficult to un-true it now.
Just like some years later you might think that MS Dhoni ran for elections.
Cass Sunstein titled his new book 'Look Again'.
‘Look again’. Especially this election season.
*I just picked up the book, and might have some ideas to share from it in future posts.
Women’s Day
This wasn’t last week. But I paused to think about it only now. Apparently empty tropical beaches and hot showers are great places for it. And it’s still March!
This Women’s day, like every year, we had a little celebration at office. As is customary, I had a little impromptu speech.
The ratio of women in our office has gone up year-on-year. There has been no grand design for representation and inclusivity here. We had new openings, and some candidates were better than others. They just happened to be women.
In the little speech, I admitted some blindspots I have as a male founder, which might reflect in how I operate certain aspects of the business. For example, we hold a cricket tournament every quarter. But the women aren't interested in playing. And we haven’t come up with an alternative.
Women’s day is meant to celebrate women. By extension, it is also meant to sensitize men. There are some of my colleagues, men, whose backgrounds don’t afford them to think about such things in any conscious way. I alluded to this in the speech.
But, is it just men who need to do this, or women too?
In the ‘Modern Wisdom’ newsletter, I came across this —
Studies show that women are more likely to express aggression toward women who are dressed more promiscuously, showing more skin. This effect is increased in the presence of men, and reduced when it’s only women around.
Most slut shaming comes from women, not men.
A few weeks back, France became the first country in history to make abortion a constitutional right. This is a watershed moment in the women’s rights movement, and women establishing autonomy over their bodies.
But take the following excerpt from the same newsletter
Polls consistently show that women are more likely than men to support a reduction on the abortion limit.
28% of men supported a reduction vs 46% of women. (YouGov 2011)
24% of men vs 49% of women. (YouGov 2012)
35% of men vs 59% of women. (Angus Reid)
Totally counterintuitive huh. What’s really going on? An evolutionary psychologist would call it ‘Intra-sexual Competition’, competition among individuals of the same sex for access to mates.
The newsletter sums it up better than I would have.
If you think that women don’t ever compete with each other and only do these things from a place of helping other women, then you also think that it’s ONLY men who compete with the same sex.
That implies that women are passive creatures who just let mating happen to them, without competing with other women for access to the best mates.
That’s a superbly patronising view of women, which disempowers them as agents of their own destiny.
A better view is that, like men, women stand to gain from competing with the same sex for mates
Do women need to be ‘saved’ from other women, as much as they need to be ‘saved’ from men?
That was the week that went by.
See you soon!
I was not expecting this series to be this good. Thank you Abhimanyu.