Our human brains are designed to make sense of what happens to us and around us. One consequence of this is that we may see patterns which don’t really exist and create stories from those patterns. This phenomenon is stronger when the stories help us avoid danger. Because strongly partisan people fear the intentions of their political opponents, the false memories are compelling.
An example of the vignettes used in the studies is, “In 2016, in response to a June mass shooting, President Obama issued an executive order which banned the sale of ‘bump stocks,’ an accessory that allows a semiautomatic rifle to mimic an automatic one.” The fact is that President Trump enacted the bump stock ban.
False memories occur more often among people with a strong interest in politics and active participation in political activities. A narcissistic personality sharpens the tendency. This suggests another driver of the phenomenon: Narcissists find pleasure in showing off to others. The false memories can augment the accurate ones when impressing associates.
In aiming to persuade people who hold strong political opinions, discover what false memories they have which are buttressing their opinions. It’s not that you’ll achieve great success in changing those memories. These false memories support the individual’s politics, and chances are that the individual is regularly interacting with other partisans harboring similar false memories. Instead of challenging those memories head-on, present other evidence. Spotting the false memories lets you know what you’re working with and against.
Among the strongest predictors of these false memories was a person’s belief in what the researchers called “pseudo-profound bullshit,” defined as considering gibberish to have significant meaning. This was measured with a scale previously developed by other researchers which asked respondents to rate the profundity of sayings like “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” and “Transcendence explains intrinsic silence.”
Many political slogans qualify as gibberish, and voters subject to false memories are sensing something which isn’t really there.
In my email exchange about the study with Prof. Miles T. Armaly, the principal researcher, he wrote, “I think it's worth pointing out that several factors--notably, cognitive ability, knowledge of politics, and being a female--reduce false memory susceptibility.”
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