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Misinformation Is Killing Our Democracy [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-05-07

I don't think the Democratic Party gets just how serious the information effect has, and is harming our democracy. It's not just about the voting booth. It has torn apart families after children falsely accuse their parents of raping them. It puts innocent people in jail by a witness that is interrogated with bias. If the appropriate level of urgency was really felt in the party, all means of using the media would have already been utilized to combat it.

At 7:22

In recent years I've teamed up with a psychiatrist, who has for example been studying soldiers who are going to Survival School we have in the United States. A Survival School option is where soldiers will learn what it's like for them, if they're ever captured as prisoners of war. It's an extremely stressful, arousing experience. I won't go through the whole Survival School program, but one piece of it involves 30 minutes very aggressive, hostile, arousing interrogation. Later on, these soldiers are going to be questioned about their experience, and Charles Morgan the psychiatrist, who has been in charge of studying these soldiers - and he's interested in things like, you know the coping of soldiers to distress will experience.

Well, I had a chance to talk Morgan into introducing misinformation into one of these survival schools of studies, and so for example the person conducting that hostile interrogation might be the guy on the left. I'll call him the actual perpetrator, but through misinformation we suggest it was the guy on the right. How the misinformation is introduced is actually the way we did it in this particular study, is when the survival school is over and we're questioning the soldiers about their memory, and we hold up a photo and say "remember the guy who did that hostile half hour interrogation of you? Did he give you a blanket? Did he give you anything to eat? Did he let you talk to anyone else?

As the soldiers are trying to answer these questions, the trick is - this is a photograph of a completely different person, and later on we test our soldier's ability to identify the individual who conducted that interrogation, and many of them will go ahead and pick the guy on the right. The misinformation we also planted, is non-existent objects into the minds of these soldiers - and so there was no telephone, there was no weapon in the interrogation room, there were no glasses on the interrogator.

And without misinformation people rarely later on claim to have seen these objects, but rarely but when we introduce misinformation that suggested those objects were there - lots and lots of people said they saw a telephone in the interrogation room, but statistically more than controls. So, weapons or glasses on the interrogator.

So now I've summarized for you about 30 or more years of work on the Misinformation Effect. The Misinformation Effect is simply this: you expose people to misinformation; we talked about putting them in the misled condition, and you depressed their memory performance.

Why I think this is important, is because out there in the real world, misinformation is everywhere. We get misinformation when we are interrogated by an investigator who has an agenda, a hypothesis about what happened, (and then) communicates that hypothesis information when witnesses to the same event talk to one another. We can get misinformation if you turn on television and you read newspapers. And you perhaps have experienced some high publicity event and now you get other information from others who are being queried in the media, or media reports about an event.

All of these situations provide an opportunity for new information to enter a witnesse's memory - and cause an alteration contamination, or even just a supplementation to the memory.

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