The political news in the United States is filled right now with stories from the crucial to the bizarre. On the crucial side is the ongoing debate about health care. On the bizarre end is the side-show of the "birthers" who question whether Barack Obama was born in the US.
The problem with much of this discussion is that it is filled with mis-information (what used to be called "lies," I guess). In the health-care arena, groups with vested interests in health care have created advertisements and public-relations campaigns to create scary messages about what might happen if new laws governing health care are enacted.
A big problem with this type of mis-information is that the human cognitive system is not designed to make it easy to reject false information.
In general, much of the information that we take in most of the time really is true. You open your eyes and see things around you. Most of what you see really is there and really looks like your visual system says it does. Likewise, much of what you hear, feel, taste, and smell is truly in your environment.
It would really slow your system down to have to evaluate each and every piece of information that you take in to decide whether it is true before storing it away in memory. So, the system is designed to assume that things you remember really are true and really did happen unless you can also retrieve a specific reason why that piece of information is false. Over the years, researchers like Dan Gilbert, Colleen Seifert, and Holly Johnson have done studies documenting this effect.
So here's the problem. You're watching TV or listening to the radio, and suddenly you hear a commercial or a news report making a claim about health care. Your cognitive system files that information away in memory. Even if you find out later that the information you heard was false, there are two ways it can continue to affect you.
First, hearing a negative piece of information about health care will make you feel a bit worse about health-care legislation in general. It will increase your anxiety about whether we should make any changes to the health care system. Even if you find out that the specific information you heard was false, the anxiety it created will remain.
Second, when you find out that a particular piece of information is false, it does not get removed from memory. You can't just reach into memory and erase a piece of information that is not true. So whenever you think about health care, you may still retrieve this false piece of information. In order to combat the effects of that mis-information, you now have to remember specifically that this information is not true. In this way, the lie becomes a little time-bomb in memory that can have a negative effect even though you know it is there.
Unfortunately, that means that we all need to be careful where we take information from. We live in a world in which people can pay to have information fed to us. That means we must be vigilant about what information we allow ourselves to be exposed to, because that information will affect us whether we want it to or not.
