Three Men Make A Tiger
In the Chinese history book Zhan Guo Ce it was written, that during the Warring States period (5th century BC) in China, seven prominent states battled each other and sometimes made alliances.
One year, the state of Wei allied with the state of Zhao. To ensure this alliance, the two states had to exchange princes as hostages.
Pang Cong, the minister of Wei, was chosen to accompany the prince of Wei to go to Zhao. He was worried that his political opponents would speak ill of him while he was away.
So he came to the king of Wei, saying, ‘Your Majesty, if someone were to tell you that there was a tiger running in the street, would you believe it?’
‘No.’ The king replied.
‘If two people were to tell you there was a tiger running in the street, would Your Majesty believe it?’
‘I might suspect it,’ the king said hesitatingly, ‘but I wouldn’t believe it.’
‘What if three people were to tell you that?’
After thinking for a while, the king said, ‘Yes, I would believe it.’
Pang Cong said, ‘Your Majesty, it is for sure no tiger is running in the street. But after being told by three people that there was one, you would believe it was so. Now I’m going to Han Dan (the capital of Zhao) far away from Da Liang (the capital of Wei). There will certainly be more than three people speaking ill of me in front of you, and I wish that Your Majesty would give it your discernment.’
The king said, ‘Yes, I will.’
But, after Pang Cong left, the king believed the slanderous gossip about him and no longer trusted him.
Later, Chinese people use the idiom ‘Three Men Make A Tiger’ (San Ren Cheng Hu) to describe the case in which a lie, if repeated often enough, will be accepted as truth.
Similarly, we think, what everybody says must be true…or if information is repeated by enough people, it must be true.
There’s another Chinese saying, zhongkou shuojin, jihui xiaogu , which means ‘Public clamour can melt metals and accumulation of defamation can eat away bones.’
Meaning rumours can kill a person.
The tendency to accept information is caused by certain cognitive biases. The first of which is the motivated reasoning concept, which is an emotion-biassed decision-making occurrence.
It is the idea that humans are motivated to believe whatever confirms their own opinions, and they will search for information until they can find what is in line with theirs, true or not. (Motivated reasoning).
The second concept is social consensus reality, which explains that beliefs with high societal agreement are treated like facts, whereas beliefs with relatively low agreement are more susceptible to persuasion and attitude change. Argumentum ad Populum – the fallacy of claiming that the majority is always right
One application of aforementioned, in economics for example, is that often investors either buying or shorting a certain stock or index purely because many other investors are behaving in a unilateral way.
In the short-term when many investors buy a certain stock, the stock actually gains value although the company might be underperforming and merely benefiting from current market trends.
Investors who take such decisions are not basing their justification on fundamental analysis or information, but mainly follow an investment trend that is demonstrated by a high number of other investors.
Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Among psychologists it’s known as the ‘illusion of truth’ effect.
Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda, says psychologist Tom Stafford.
Recently, a team led by Lisa Fazio of Vanderbilt University set out to test how the illusion of truth effect interacts with our prior knowledge. Would it affect our existing knowledge?
They used paired true and un-true statements, but also split their items according to how likely participants were to know the truth (so “The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” is an example of a “known” items, which also happens to be true, and “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” is an un-true item, for which people are likely to know the actual truth).
Their results show that the illusion of truth effect worked just as strongly for known as for unknown items, suggesting that prior knowledge won’t prevent repetition from swaying our judgements of plausibility.
To cover all bases, the researchers performed one study in which the participants were asked to rate how true each statement seemed on a six-point scale, and one where they just categorised each fact as “true” or “false”. Repetition pushed the average item up the six-point scale, and increased the odds that a statement would be categorised as true. For statements that were actually fact or fiction, known or unknown, repetition made them all seem more believable.
What Fazio and colleagues actually found, is that the biggest influence on whether a statement was judged to be true was… whether it actually was true. The repetition effect couldn’t mask the truth. With or without repetition, people were still more likely to believe the actual facts as opposed to the lies.
This shows something fundamental about how we update our beliefs – repetition has a power to make things sound more true, even when we know differently, but it doesn’t over-ride that knowledge
The next question has to be, why might that be? The answer is to do with the effort it takes to being rigidly logical about every piece of information you hear.
If every time you heard something you assessed it against everything you already knew, you’d still be thinking about breakfast at supper-time.
Because we need to make quick judgements, we adopt shortcuts – heuristics which are right more often than wrong. Relying on how often you’ve heard something to judge how truthful something feels is just one strategy. Any universe where truth gets repeated more often than lies, even if only 51% vs 49% will be one where this is a quick and dirty rule for judging facts.
Our minds are prey to the illusion of truth effect because our instinct is to use short-cuts in judging how plausible something is. Often this works. Sometimes it is misleading.
Once we know about the effect we can guard against it. Part of this is double-checking why we believe what we do – if something sounds plausible is it because it really is true, or have we just been told that repeatedly?
But part of guarding against the illusion is the obligation it puts on us to stop repeating falsehoods. We live in a world where the facts matter, and should matter. If you repeat things without bothering to check if they are true, you are helping to make a world where lies and truth are easier to confuse.
So, please, think before you repeat.
A new study confirms what politicians and advertisers knew all along: that TBR works on virtually any kind of claim, even highly implausible ones.
Researchers still don’t fully understand why TBR occurs, but one possibility is that it has something to do with processing fluency. Neurologically, our brains have an easier time processing things we have already heard before compared to things we have not, thereby mistaking familiarity for legitimacy.
For a long time, researchers assumed that TBR only works on statements whose truth value is ambiguous or unknown to the test subjects. “Otherwise,” as one article published in 2009 puts it, “the statements’ truthfulness will be judged on the basis of their knowledge and not on the basis of fluency.”
Like an oft-repeated claim, this assumption was accepted almost without question and readily incorporated into multinomial processing tree (MPT) modeling, a popular method for assessing the psychological processes that underpin human behavior. However, recent studies suggest that the truth value of a statement need not be ambiguous for TBR to work its magic.
One study from 2015, for instance, found that TBR applied to statements that contradicted the participants’ prior knowledge, like, “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth.” Another research paper, published in 2018, discovered a relationship between TBR and fake-news headlines shared on social media.
These studies suggest that TBR could work on any kind of claim, regardless of whether its truth value is ambiguous or not. However, they are not conclusive. While claims like, “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth,” are false, many people lack the knowledge needed to recognize them as such.
the implausibility of fake news does not become obvious until you have been exposed to different sources, something fake news victims actively avoid.
Researchers wanted to figure out if sheer repetition increases the validity of claims with unambiguous truth values, is exactly what a team of psychologists from Belgium’s UCLouvain set out to do in a recent study.
The authors of the study, which will appear in the June issue of the academic journal Cognition, asked participants to judge repeated statements as more true or less false compared to unrepeated ones, and they found that people “started giving credence to statements as highly implausible as ‘The Earth is a perfect square’ or ‘Benjamin Franklin lived 150 years’ after repeating them for just five times.”
The power of repeating lies
The study concludes that “even a limited number of repetitions can alter the perceived truth of highly implausible statements.”
In 2020, researchers conducted a similar experiment that led them to completely opposite results — namely, that repeating claims at high frequency decreases their perceived truth value.
That does not necessarily discredit the study conducted at UCLouvain. If anything, it reaffirms the notion that repetition is strongly linked to perceived truth value and that, depending on quality and context, the correlation can either be positive or negative, resulting in either truth-by-repetition or fakeness-by-repetition.
As a form of communication, propaganda as we know it today did not emerge until the start of the First World War. During this time, governments around the world figured out how to produce and distribute large, colored lithographs on a national, even global scale.
“In all countries involved in the war,” Doran Cart tells Big Think, “these lithographs or posters were produced in large numbers. Not only as propaganda, but also to mobilize people for the war effort.” Cart is a historian and senior curator at the National World War I Museum. Located in Kansas City, Missouri, the museum has one of the largest collections of propaganda posters in the world.
Before the war, political information was shared primarily through newspapers. Posters were preferable for several reasons. First and foremost, they were a primarily visual medium. Ideas and arguments were presented not only through text but also through images and symbols that could be understood immediately, regardless of whether the viewer knew how to read.
They were also a technological novelty. In a time when even movies were still being shown in black-and-white, propaganda posters were among the earliest colored images. Color gave them a lifelike quality that, in Cart’s words, helped “grab the passerby’s attention.” Posters were not glanced at, but studied at length, especially in small towns.
Last but not least, they were ubiquitous. Articles had to be stuffed inside the crowded pages of newspapers, but posters could be hung anywhere and everywhere: on walls, fences, billboards, lamp posts, and sandwich boards (wooden boards that people wore around their torso as they paraded down the street to display certain messages).
According to Cart, repetition played a key role in the distribution and effectiveness of propaganda posters. “You couldn’t get any place in the United States without running into them,” he says. Often, multiple copies of the same poster design were placed in the same location, similar to how you sometimes see multiple television screens display the same channel.
This kind of repetition served several purposes. For one, it ensured the messaging displayed on the posters was all but impossible to ignore. More importantly, though, it allowed governments to turn their various poster designs into a codified language. As the pervasiveness of this language in everyday life increased, so too did its processing fluency.
In other words, the more familiar people were with a particular poster design, the less effort they required to process its meaning. Cart cites the famous “I Want You” poster as an example. Over time, the poster’s original meaning became associated with and represented by the iconic pose of Uncle Sam pointing directly at the viewer with a stern look on his face.
The “I Want You” poster became so iconic that it turned into a meme — that is, a widely known visual template that can be modified for different situations, yet remains easily understandable. It has not only been used by other countries as part of their mobilization efforts, but also to make political statements, like this one concerning Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Finally, propagandists have used repetition to both falsify and verify specific claims. During the Second World War, the Allies used posters as well as animated cartoons to cast doubt on information that was being shared by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Topics ranged from the size of their armies to the technical prowess of their weaponry.
American propaganda in World War I, concludes Cart, repeated its principal themes “like a kind of drumbeat.” The heroic image of the patriotic soldier risking his life for the country, as well as the ideal of the American home that needs to be defended from foreign enemies, are two examples of images introduced during this period that, through their sheer repetition, are generally regarded as unquestionable today.