Those who remember the sorry saga of the Iraq war no doubt recall the numerous, shifting explanations of why the US attacked an unprovoked invasion of a country that had no ability to mount an attack on the US. Once the canard of “weapons of mass destruction” was dismissed, one of the next set of bogus explanations was that Osama bin Laden was in cahoots with Sadaam Hussein. That was implausible on its face; bin Laden had tried to destabilize Iraq, and various leaks from intelligence sources disputed the Administration lies party line (see here and here for example). Bush eventually ‘fessed up that there was no connection between Iraq and al Quaeda.
But there was no risk in denying the myth at that point. Indeed, it turns out that our brains are wired so badly that mentioning two ideas as being connected, whether to claim they are linked or to deny it, serves to reinforce the belief that they ARE connected. Call it “the lady doth protest too much” effect. A 2007 Washington Post article explains:
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.”
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.
Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.
The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.
Even worse, when an erroneous belief is confronted frontally, people still cling to it if it supports an outcome to which they are attached. For instance, surveys found that Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to believe in a Saddam-Osama connection, even after Bush had repudiated it. An article in Sociological Inquiry describes how survey participants who had believed in a Saddam-Osama connection responded when presented with information that the relationship did not exist, including the 2005 climbdown by Bush himself:
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http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/04/orwell-watch-democracy-being-linked-to-socialism.html
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