Debunking a rumor can make it seem more true?

This is fascinating yet discouraging at the same time:

Rumor’s Reasons

By FARHAD MANJOO

The psychologists expected that seniors would mistakenly remember some false statements as true. What was remarkable, though, was which claims they most often got wrong the ones they had been exposed to multiple times. In other words, the more that researchers had stressed that a given warning was false, the more likely seniors were to eventually come to believe it was true. (College students in the study did not make the same mistakes.)

To understand this turnabout, says Norbert Schwarz, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who worked with Skurnik on the study, it helps to know how our brains suss out truth from fiction. To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.

This helps explain why the JFK conspiracy theories persist. Debunking them makes them more familiar which causes some people to believe them.

This is an area where Fox News could do good work. It is also perfect for their tabloid tastes and methods. Imagine if they tackled this mother lode of conspiracy theories. Skip the question “was there a conspiracy?”. That question has been answered definitively by Posner and especially Bugliosi. The unexamined angle is the beliefs and actions of the rag tag band of loons and frauds who represent the critics of the Warren Commission.

It is a wonderful story of lying leftists, UFO believers, comsymps, intellectual wannabees, KGB money, and wacky charlatans. There are even connections to John Kerry, O. J. Simpson, and Hollywood.

Like I said, it is a story right in FNC’s wheelhouse.

The great thing for Fox News is that all the hard digging has been done for them. It is sitting out here in the internet and in books. Hugh Aynesworth could fill an hour just telling stories about his encounters with the “CT community.”