Why Do So Many Americans Believe Trump’s Lies?
By: Brett Pelham
Tags: Politics, Politics And Elections, Psychology, Propaganda, Trump

Photo by Capturing the human heart, courtesy of Unsplash

Even after the U.S. electoral college made it official that Joe Biden is the President-elect, many Americans continue to believe that Democrats stole the election. According to an early December, 2020, Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely U.S. voters, 47% of Americans believe that it is at least “somewhat likely” that “Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Joe Biden would win.” To be sure, Rasmussen has been criticized by progressives because their survey questions sometimes invite conservative responses. But because that issue is a matter for a different blog, I’m going to trust this part of their recent survey. In fact, Rasmussen reports that one in six Democrats (17%) say it is “very likely” that Democrats stole the election.

The progressive voter in me finds this 17% figure hard to fathom. The psychologist in me is thankful that it isn’t worse. A surprisingly high percentage of Americans do seem to believe Trump’s destructive lie that Joe Biden stole the election. They believe it for a simple and powerful reason: They keep hearing it. To appreciate how powerful, and worrisome, this principle is, you have to know something about how the human brain believes. Research in fields as diverse as human development, persuasion, human memory, language processing, and social cognition shows that the human brain accepts almost everything it processes as true and real. It is only by means of careful, step-by-step reasoning that we ever come to recognize anything that we see or hear as false.

Consider a few examples, which I’ll present in roughly their order of discovery.

The sleeper effect: In the late 1940s and early 1950s, researchers asked Yale University students to read a well-crafted persuasive essay arguing that nuclear submarines were about to become a reality. But these students were told that the source of the essay was the Russian newspaper Pravda. Of course, very few of these students were persuaded. The students probably assumed that a Russian newspaper was not to be trusted. But these same students were also contacted by phone, about a month later. At this point, they reported their opinions on a wide range of topics, one of which happened to be the feasibility of nuclear submarines. The same students who had previously reported that nuclear submarines were an impossibility now reported that the subs were probably on their way. Seven decades later, we know why this belief grew. When students first heard arguments for nuclear subs, they dismissed the arguments as Russian propaganda. But a month later, many of these students remembered the basics of what they had heard but forgot where (from whom) they had heard it. People remember things they have encountered way better than they remember who told them. A recent review showed that sleeper effects are particularly strong when people hear persuasive messages and think hard about them but immediately learn that the messages are from an unreliable source. In the weeks that follow, people begin to believe what they were initially told because they remember the message well but forget where they heard it.

This will work well in the short-run. But in the long-run, it will make you think Tim Howell is famous.

Becoming famous overnight: Research on human memory further supports the view that we have a hard time dismissing untruths. A research team headed by cognitive psychologist Larry Jacoby conducted a series of clever studies in which they told people, truthfully, that the people included on a list of names were not famous. Sebastian Weisdorf, for example, is not famous. Trust me. Shortly after examining the list, most people were very good at reporting that the people on the list were not famous. But as little as one day later, when people saw names like Sebastian Weisdorf (which now felt vaguely familiar), many people were convinced that Sebastian must be famous for something. Why else would people recognize his name?

The perseverance effect: People even accept lies after just having been told that they were lied to. To put this a little differently, classic research in social psychology shows that people are much better at believing than at unbelieving. Long ago, Lee Ross and his colleagues asked Stanford University students to try to tell the difference between real and fake suicide notes. This is a surprisingly difficult task, by the way. By the flip of a coin, half of the students were falsely told that they crushed the suicide note detection task. Others were told they had performed poorly. Then all of the students were told, truthfully, that the feedback they had just received was false — that it had been determined by the flip of a coin. Now, all of the students were asked to estimate just how good they would be if they were to be given accurate feedback about their ability to distinguish between real and fake suicide notes. The lies people knew they had just been told biased their judgments. Those who knew they’d been falsely told they crushed the test thought they’d rock at the real test. Those who knew they’d been falsely told they failed the test thought they’d struggle at the real thing. We human beings are so prone to belief over disbelief that sometimes we believe lies that we fully know to have been lies.

The person taking this True-False quiz guessed correctly that George Washington did NOT have nine brothers. But if you repeat this specific true-false question for several weeks, most test takers will begin to believe that the statement is true.

Believing that which is repeated: Many decades ago, a group of cognitive psychologists led by Lynne Hasher wanted to see if simple repetition promotes belief — even when people are repeatedly exposed to information with zero validity. Hasher and colleagues asked students to answer a series of difficult trivia questions. Students were told, truthfully, that exactly half of the statements they’d evaluate were false. In other words, the average true/false statement had no validity whatsoever. The trivia questions included statements such as “The capybara is the largest of the marsupials.” and “French horn players get cash bonuses for being in the U.S. army.” In case you’re interested, capybaras are not marsupials. But at the time of this study, French horn playing soldiers did get those cash bonuses. But that’s not the point. The point is that students knew that the questions they evaluated was just as likely to be false as true. And here’s where it gets interesting. Hasher and colleagues gave multiple trivia quizzes over about a five-week period. Further, they repeated a few of the specific true-false statements. I’m guessing you can predict what they found. By the end of the study, the true-false statements that had been repeated over the course of the study were evaluated by most students as likely to be true. The simple repetition of dubious information makes that information start to feel true.

Research shows that it’s very hard for you to read this fake statement without believing it.

Believing that which is merely presented: For almost three decades, social psychologist Dan Gilbert and colleagues have argued that the tendency to believe everything we see and hear is so fundamental that the very process of hearing or reading a statement requires us to believe it — at least briefly. That’s right; Gilbert argues that you cannot read even the most preposterous statement without initially accepting it as true. That includes statements such as “Playing the French horn to capybaras makes them float in the air.” In one study, Gilbert’s team asked students to read what they thought were statements in the Hopi Indian language. They might read that “a suffa is a cloud” or that “a nasli is a snake.” All the statements had this simple “Hopi word is English word” format. But on half the trials of this task, students saw a signal indicating that the statement in question was false. But this signal didn’t stop the students from encoding the statements as true. This was particularly true when people had to do two things at once (to process the false sentence while also listening carefully for a tone). As the late psychologist Dan Wegner surely would have agreed, the human tendency to believe what we see or hear is one reason why being told that something is not true can often make people believe that it is. Statements such as “Chris Federico not linked to mafia” convince many people that there is a good chance Chris Federico is a crook.

Social media magnification: These classic studies are but a few in a long list showing that people are predisposed to believe everything they hear and read. The “echo chambers” of social media only exaggerate this basic human tendency to believe the unbelievable. If you’d like to see how popular Facebook has been on the internet in the past 12 months, just check out the chart below, generated using Google Trends. The chart compares the level of U.S. Google search activity for “Facebook” with search activity for the fact-checked “New York Times.” In fact, even “God” cannot compete with Facebook these days.

Unscrupulous people who know about the power of human belief over disbelief need merely to keep repeating lies and misrepresentations. Facebook posts will endlessly recycle the lies. Widespread false beliefs will reliably follow.

Consider how many people still believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Or consider the many Americans who have sent donations to a tax-evading billionaire — to help him with his legal efforts to overturn an election he lost by more than seven million votes. As of December 1, 2020, Trump had received more than $170 million in donations — much of the money from middle-class Americans — to help him fight what he keeps insisting was a stolen election. It is hard to find a more powerful testament to the enduring power of the simple repetition of lies.

One might hope that more than 50 failed lawsuits, including many that were heard by highly conservative judges, would make people reconsider whether Trump was really robbed. But the human mind is strongly prone to belief. Sadly, Trump has proven in the past month that he is willing to capitalize on this human foible and create harm and distrust in millions of American voters. Let’s hope that in the next four years, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can get people to believe simple truths as well as Trump has gotten them to believe dangerous lies.