Lies and bullshit: The negative effects of misinformation grow stronger over time

Petrocelli, J. V., Seta, C. E., & Seta, J. J. (2023). 

Applied Cognitive Psychology, 37(2), 409–418. 

https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4043

Abstract

In a world where exposure to untrustworthy communicators is common, trust has become more important than ever for effective marketing. Nevertheless, we know very little about the long-term consequences of exposure to untrustworthy sources, such bullshitters. This research examines how untrustworthy sources—liars and bullshitters—influence consumer attitudes toward a product. Frankfurt's (1986) insidious bullshit hypothesis (i.e., bullshitting is evaluated less negatively than lying but bullshit can be more harmful than are lies) is examined within a traditional sleeper effect—a persuasive influence that increases, rather than decays over time. We obtained a sleeper effect after participants learned that the source of the message was either a liar or a bullshitter. However, compared to the liar source condition, the same message from a bullshitter resulted in more extreme immediate and delayed attitudes that were in line with an otherwise discounted persuasive message (i.e., an advertisement). Interestingly, attitudes returned to control condition levels when a bullshitter was the source of the message, suggesting that knowing an initially discounted message may be potentially accurate/inaccurate (as is true with bullshit, but not lies) does not result in the long-term discounting of that message. We discuss implications for marketing and other contexts of persuasion.

General Discussion

There is a considerable body of knowledge about the antecedents and consequences of lying in marketing and other contexts (e.g., Ekman, 1985), but much less is known about the other untrustworthy source: The Bullshitter. The current investigation suggests that the distinction between bullshitting and lying is important to marketing and to persuasion more generally. People are exposed to scores of lies and bullshit every day and this exposure has increased dramatically as the use of the internet has shifted from a platform for socializing to a source of information (e.g., Di Domenico et al., 2021). Because things such as truth status and source status fade faster than familiarity, illusory truth effects for consumer products can emerge after only 3 days post-initial exposure (Skurnik et al., 2005), and within the hour for basic knowledge questions (Fazio et al., 2015). As mirrored in our conditions that received discounting cues after the initial attitude information, at times people are lied to, or bullshitted, and only learn afterwards they were deceived. It is then that these untrustworthy sources appear to have a sleeper effect creating unwarranted and undiscounted attitudes.

It should be noted that our data do not suggest that the impact of lie and bullshit discounting cues fade differentially. However, the discounting cue in the bullshit condition had less of an immediate and long-term suppression effect than in the lie condition. In fact, after 14 days, the bullshit communication not only had more of an influence on attitudes, but the influence was not significantly different from that of the control communication. This finding suggests that bullshit can be more insidious than lies. As it relates to marketing, the insidious nature of exposure to bullshit can create false beliefs that subsequently affect behavior, even when people have been told that the information came from a person known to spread bullshit. The insidious nature of bullshit is magnified by the fact that even when it is clear that one is expressing his/her opinion via bullshit, people do not appear to hold the bullshitter to the same standard as the liar (Frankfurt, 1986). People may think that at least the bullshitter often believes his/her own bullshit, whereas the liar knows his/her statement is not true (Bernal, 2006; Preti, 2006; Reisch, 2006). Because of this difference, what may appear to be harmless communications from a bullshitter may have serious repercussions for consumers and organizations. Additionally, along with the research of Foos et al. (2016), the present research suggests that the harmful influence of untrustworthy sources may not be recognized initially but appears over time. The present research suggests that efforts to fight the consequences of fake news (see Atkinson, 2019) are more difficult because of the sleeper effect. The negative effects of unsubstantiated or false information may not only persist but may grow stronger over time.

The research is here.

Trump's Strangest Lie: A Plague of Suicides Under His Watch

Gilad Edelman

wired.com

Originally published 23 Oct 2020

IN LAST NIGHT’S presidential debate, Donald Trump repeated one of his more unorthodox reelection pitches. “People are losing their jobs,” he said. “They’re committing suicide. There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level that nobody’s ever seen before.”

It’s strange to hear an incumbent president declare, as an argument in his own favor, that a wave of suicides is occurring under his watch. It’s even stranger given that it’s not true. While Trump has been warning since March that any pandemic lockdowns would lead to “suicides by the thousands,” several studies from abroad have found that when governments imposed such restrictions in the early waves of the pandemic, there was no corresponding increase in these deaths. In fact, suicide rates may even have declined. A preprint study released earlier this week found that the suicide rate in Massachusetts didn’t budge even as that state imposed a strong stay-at-home order in March, April, and May.

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Add this to the list of tragic ironies of the Trump era: The president is using the nonexistent link between lockdowns and suicide to justify an agenda that really could cause more people to take their own lives.

The info is here.

Facebook isn’t free speech, it’s algorithmic amplification optimized for outrage

Jon Evans
techcrunch.com
Originally published October 20, 2019

This week Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech in which he extolled “giving everyone a voice” and fighting “to uphold a wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible.” That sounds great, of course! Freedom of expression is a cornerstone, if not the cornerstone, of liberal democracy. Who could be opposed to that?

The problem is that Facebook doesn’t offer free speech; it offers free amplification. No one would much care about anything you posted to Facebook, no matter how false or hateful, if people had to navigate to your particular page to read your rantings, as in the very early days of the site.

But what people actually read on Facebook is what’s in their News Feed … and its contents, in turn, are determined not by giving everyone an equal voice, and not by a strict chronological timeline. What you read on Facebook is determined entirely by Facebook’s algorithm, which elides much — censors much, if you wrongly think the News Feed is free speech — and amplifies little.

What is amplified? Two forms of content. For native content, the algorithm optimizes for engagement. This in turn means people spend more time on Facebook, and therefore more time in the company of that other form of content which is amplified: paid advertising.

Of course this isn’t absolute. As Zuckerberg notes in his speech, Facebook works to stop things like hoaxes and medical misinformation from going viral, even if they’re otherwise anointed by the algorithm. But he has specifically decided that Facebook will not attempt to stop paid political misinformation from going viral.

The info is here.

Editor's note: Facebook is one of the most defective products that millions of Americans use everyday.

Trump lawyers may have given false info about Cohen payments

Tal Axelrod
thehill.com
Originally posted February 15, 2019

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said Friday the panel believes two attorneys for President Trump may have given false information to government ethics officials.

Cummings said the panel has reviewed newly uncovered documents from the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) suggesting Trump's personal lawyer Sheri Dillon and former White House lawyer Stefan Passantino gave false info about hush-money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.

“It now appears that President Trump’s other attorneys — at the White House and in private practice — may have provided false information about these payments to federal officials,” Cummings wrote in a letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

Cummings said Dillon “repeatedly stated to federal officials at OGE that President Trump never owed any money to Mr. Cohen in 2016 and 2017” and Passantino falsely told officials that Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen had a “retainer agreement.”

The info is here.

10 ways to detect health-care lies

Lawton R. Burns and Mark V. Pauly
thehill.com
Originally posted December 9, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Why does this kind of behavior occur? While flat-out dishonesty for short-term financial gains is an obvious answer, a more common explanation is the need to say something positive when there is nothing positive to say.

This problem is acute in health care. Suppose you are faced with the assignment of solving the ageless dilemma of reducing costs while simultaneously raising quality of care. You could respond with a message of failure or a discussion of inevitable tradeoffs.

But you could also pick an idea with some internal plausibility and political appeal, fashion some careful but conditional language and announce the launch of your program. Of course, you will add that it will take a number of years before success appears, but you and your experts will argue for the idea in concept, with the details to be worked out later.

At minimum, unqualified acceptance of such proposed ideas, even (and especially) by apparently qualified people, will waste resources and will lead to enormous frustration for your audience of politicians and outraged critics of the current system. The incentives to generate falsehoods are not likely to diminish — if anything, rising spending and stagnant health outcomes strengthen them — so it is all the more important to have an accurate and fast way to detect and deter lies in health care.

The info is here.

Bornstein claims Trump dictated the glowing health letter

Alex Marquardt and Lawrence Crook
CNN.com
Originally posted May 2, 2018

When Dr. Harold Bornstein described in hyperbolic prose then-candidate Donald Trump's health in 2015, the language he used was eerily similar to the style preferred by his patient.

It turns out the patient himself wrote it, according to Bornstein.

"He dictated that whole letter. I didn't write that letter," Bornstein told CNN on Tuesday. "I just made it up as I went along."

The admission is an about face from his answer more than two years when the letter was released and answers one of the lingering questions about the last presidential election. The letter thrust the eccentric Bornstein, with his shoulder-length hair and round eyeglasses, into public view.

"His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary," he crowed in the letter, which was released by Trump's campaign in December 2015. "If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency."

The missive didn't offer much medical evidence for those claims beyond citing a blood pressure of 110/65, described by Bornstein as "astonishingly excellent." It claimed Trump had lost 15 pounds over the preceding year. And it described his cardiovascular health as "excellent."

The info is here.

10 Ways to Avoid False Memories

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
Slate.com
Originally posted February 10, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

No one has, to our knowledge, tried to implant a false memory of being shot down in a helicopter. But researchers have repeatedly created other kinds of entirely false memory in the laboratory. Most famously, Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell successfully convinced people that, as children, they had once been lost in a shopping mall. In another study, researchers Kimberly Wade, Maryanne Garry, Don Read, and Stephen Lindsay showed people a Photoshopped image of themselves as children, standing in the basket of a hot air balloon. Half of the participants later had either complete or partial false memories, sometimes “remembering” additional details from this event—an event that they never experienced. In a newly published study, Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter used structured interviews to convince 70 percent of their college student participants that they had committed a crime as an adolescent (theft, assault, or assault with a weapon) and that the crime had resulted in police contact. And outside the laboratory, people have fabricated rich and detailed memories of things that we can be almost 100 percent certain did not happen, such as having been abducted and impregnated by aliens.

Even memories for highly emotional events—like the Challenger explosion or the 9/11 attacks—can mutate substantially. As time passes, we can lose the link between things we’ve experienced and the details surrounding them; we remember the gist of a story, but we might not recall whether we experienced the events or just heard about them from someone else. We all experience this failure of “source memory” in small ways: Maybe you tell a friend a great joke that you heard recently, only to learn that he’s the one who told it to you. Or you recall having slammed your hand in a car door as a child, only to get into an argument over whether it happened instead to your sister. People sometimes even tell false stories directly to the people who actually experienced the original events, something that is hard to explain as intentional lying. (Just last month, Brian Williams let his exaggerated war story be told at a public event honoring one of the soldiers who had been there.)

The information is here.

How You Justified 10 Lies (or Didn’t)

By Gerald Dworkin
The New York Times - The Stone
Originally published January 14, 2016

Thanks to Stone readers who submitted a response — there were more than 10,000 — to my article, “Are These 10 Lies Justified.” Judging from the number of replies, the task of determining when it is or is not acceptable to lie is obviously one that many people have faced in their own lives. Many of you gave your own examples of lies told and why you believed they were or were not justified. It was heartening to find so many people prepared to reason thoughtfully about important moral issues.

With few exceptions, readers disagreed with me about the legitimacy of one or more of the lies, all of which I believe are justified. (You can revisit the original article, here.)

The results, as well as the original scenarios that you were asked to respond to, are below.

The article is here.

Mike Daisey is a Liar, and So am I

By John Warner

HigherEd

Originally published on March 17, 2012

Mike Daisey is a liar.

John D’Agata is a liar.

Greg Mortenson is a liar.

James Frey is a liar.

I am a liar.

You are a liar.

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When I discuss ethics with my students, we try to suss out whether or not there are any universal truths, things which we all agree are wrong. They name the usual suspects, murder, stealing, assault, cheating, lying, etc… I then go down the line and ask how many of them have violated one of these rules at some point in their lives. They laugh as I ask about murder, and even assault. Some will admit to a petty theft of a sister’s sweater or a candy bar from a convenience store. Lots will admit to having cheated in school at one point or another. (But never in my class, of course.)

I leave lying out of the discussion, and then turn to other matters briefly before coming back to our list, and ask, “have any of you committed one of these terribly foul acts today?” Again, they laugh. Here, maybe I’ll go to the board and tap the dry erase pen on the word “lying.”

“Who’s told a lie today?” I ask.

It’s fun to watch a room full of people think. It’s one of the chief pleasures of teaching. After a few more beats as their faces softly collapse in that way that signals a small epiphany, I’ll say, “I’ve told a lie today, probably several if I think about it, and you have too.”

I ask them what they’ve lied about that day, and it’s always trivial. A lie to mom and dad about what they did the night before, or to a friend about their availability for lunch. My own lies are the same, why I didn’t make it to the previous night’s hockey game, or if I noticed that we were almost out of milk before I poured the last of it on my cereal.

In our minds, we use the “white lie” defense, a “diplomatic or well-intentioned untruth.”

“Well-intentioned.”

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Let us also acknowledge the rationale that we tell these lies in service of some greater truth is also complete and utter bullshit. Mike Daisey and Greg Mortenson and John D’Agata and James Frey, and me will tell you that we tell the lie not to enrich ourselves, or for reasons of self-preservation, but because, in the words of Daisey, we “want to make people care.”

This is convenient, and maybe we even believe it, but that doesn’t make it true. It would even be handy to blame these lies on simple greed. Mortenson and Frey have profited to the tune of millions. It’s possible Daisey is approaching that.

But I think there’s a deeper truth here, a motivation that extends beyond the transparent B.S. that these lies are in the service of a higher calling.

What these lies invariably do to the stories is take the focus off the story itself, and place it on the storyteller.

Even before Daisey’s lies were exposed, his use of them served to make himself more central to the tale. The story is no longer about exploited workers, but about an intrepid and dogged Mike Daisey who cares so darn much he has to go and witness firsthand how his gadgets get made, and once there, connects so personally and profoundly with these workers, that only he can come back home and tell the story in a way that will change hearts and minds. Daisey isn’t in it for the money, but for the ego.

The entire text is here.