The Illusion of Truth

This post is the fifteenth part of a series of business-friendly posts, looking at cognitive biases and how they impact our ability to communicate and operate effectively.

What is it?

It comes down to this: repetition makes a fact seem more true, whether it is true or not.

• “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.”

Why it occurs:

We seem to attribute truth to statements just because we are familiar with them — familiarity breeds trust. By experiencing repeated statements, people become more familiar with them and we start to judge the statements as more trustworthy, and therefore truthful.

We are not perfect machines in our assessment of each and every statement we hear — we adopt shortcuts, use assumptions and make quick judgments to determine if we should believe a statement. One of those shortcuts appears to be that reliability is increased by frequency of exposure.

Where might you see it occur in real life?

Political messages often take advantage of this effect. Repeated statements, while not necessarily blatant lies (although let’s not rule those out), are a deviation from the truth, or a partial story. Repetition makes them easier to believe.

In the current political climate, does this sound at all familiar?

Why is it important?

Your interpretation of the world, and the interpretation of those around you, can be manipulated by repeated exposure to ideas. This is particularly powerful when combined with mass media. Some studies have even shown that prior knowledge won’t prevent repetition from swaying our judgements of plausibility.

What is the impact when communicating a message?

Be aware that this is something you will likely have to combat, especially when communicating a new idea. Your audience will likely have been exposed to a “fact” repeatedly throughout their professional lives — if that fact is wrong, you’ll have to work hard to overcome the pre-existing trust in it. That will mean presenting an overwhelming wall of facts, examples and proof points, as well as directly pointing out the illusion of truth by depicting failures.

You can download a handy “quick” reference infographic about this and other cognitive biases here. Next up we will take a look at the Ambiguity Effect.