GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Cognitive psychology studies how people remember the details of an experience and the gist of an idea. In a classic study, Bransford and Franks (1971) threw spaghetti against the wall and measured the resulting stain. Actually, what they did was give people short sentences and th...

How could this apply in a disinformation campaign? How could the spaghetti tossed against the wall leave a stain? Let’s consider White Replacement Conspiracy Theory. This is a disinformation campaign that suggests that some unidentified group of elites is conspiring to change the voters in the US...

The gist remains. The stain on the wall is hard to remove. In the case of this conspiracy theory, the basic idea is widely accepted. In a recent survey, the Associated Press asked if people agreed with the idea that a group of elites was trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who...

In creating the sentences that people studied, Bransford and Franks related each to an underlying understanding of different situations—the basic gist. Some sentences presented pieces of the underlying idea that “the girl who lives next door broke the large window on the porch”, ...

To counter disinformation, the truth must be as aggressive. In a recent study, Broockman and Kalla (2022) paid people to switch from watching Fox News to CNN for a month. When people changed their news diet, their beliefs changed as well. Providing accurate information

Now add some spaghetti sauce. If the noodles are coated in a nice tomato sauce, that will splatter against the wall as well, and a tomato sauce stain is hard to remove. The stain will remain on the wall and the idea will remain in someone’s mind. The basic idea of the disinformat...

This set of ideas contains racism and anti-immigrant undertones. Many politicians and media personalities have made statements related to this idea. Someone can find reports about these statements in articles from The New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR. The Times noted that this basic i...

Lady Macbeth’s famous line concerns seeing the blood of a murdered man on her hands. She has washed her hands and tried to remove the stain. But the stain remains in her mind. And in her dreams and while sleepwalking, she still rubs her clean hands trying to remove the spot of blood from the man ...

The risk of disinformation campaigns is not simply the individual statements. Those ideas are the spaghetti thrown against the wall. Disinformation campaigns present varied ideas that are often discredited, and people generally forget individual statements. But