How We Know What Isn't So (17 page)

More ominously, the desire to entertain can also lead a speaker to take liberties with the facts without any tacit agreement on the part of the listener. The decision to stretch the truth is often made unilaterally, and the inaccuracies and distortions are foisted on what is frequently an unsuspecting audience. One of the most common sources of such inaccuracy is the dissemination of unfounded or fallacious claims by news and other media organizations that try to entice an audience by their ability to entertain. As NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw admits, “It’s tricky, trying to generate understanding and insight while not ignoring the entertainment factor.”
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Inaccuracies and fabrications propagated by the media are a particularly powerful cause of people’s erroneous beliefs, in part because of the reputation much of the media have for objectivity and accuracy, a reputation that is not always deserved. The prescription that “you cannot believe everything you read” has unfortunately not been adequately incorporated into the public consciousness. It often seems overshadowed by the counter-slogan that “they couldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.”

But much is said that is not true. Those who work in the mass media face tremendous pressure to put out a product—to meet a deadline, fill an hour, or generate advertising space. Often the demand for suitable material outstrips the supply of factual stories that are novel and interesting, and the temptation to stretch the truth or lower one’s standards of objectivity and verification can be enormous. The demand for news is met by an artificial increase in supply. The public is then treated to misleading stories about psychic detectives, UFO’s, the Shroud of Turin, and the like—stories that leave a permanent imprint on the beliefs of much of the public, even in those rare cases in which the critical response to the initial story is given coverage as well. One wonders, for example, what kind of rash decisions have been made because of the well-publicized, but subsequently discredited claim that an unmarried American woman over 40 is as likely to be killed by a terrorist as to experience matrimony.
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Because amazing feats are entertaining, the media often plays up amazing events for all (or more than) they are worth, distorts many not-so-amazing events to make them appear extraordinary, and sometimes even passes on complete fabrications from unreliable sources. As indicated previously, the most common subjects of such uncritical, sensationalistic coverage are examples of paranormal phenomena such as Bigfoot, UFO sightings, and the (positive) findings of ESP experiments. Also common are extraordinary applications of the ordinary processes of the human mind, like the use of mental imagery to cure cancer and other physical and social ailments. It may be helpful to examine in some detail one such example of media distortion in the pursuit of entertainment.

NBC-TV once ran several episodes of “Project UFO,” a program dealing with reports of unidentified flying objects.
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The show tried to garner legitimacy for its contents by stating that the series was inspired by a U.S. Air Force investigation of UFO’s called “Project Blue Book.” Although the official emblem of the U.S. Air Force was prominently displayed on the screen as an implicit seal-of-approval, much of what was depicted in the show was at variance with the conclusions of the Air Force investigation. Project Blue Book, for example, ended with this summary:

1. no unidentified flying object reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security;
   
2. there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge;
   
3. there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED are extraterrestrial vehicles.
   

Project UFO, however, after depicting numerous flights of alien space ships throughout the program, ended by showing—for two and one-half seconds—the text of only the first of these conclusions. The implication conveyed to those who were quick enough to read this disclaimer was that there may have been some UFO’s that were identified as extraterrestrial, but that were not dangerous. For all but the most sophisticated or skeptical viewers, Project UFO’s treatment of this subject obviously made the claims of extraterrestrial visitation seem much more substantial than they really are. The interests of entertainment won out over the responsibility to inform.

An experience of my Cornell colleague Daryl Bem is also informative as to how the media’s desire to provide its audience with tidy, interesting stories can deprive the public of an accurate perspective on a flashy topic. Bem had been invited to participate on CBS’s
Good Morning
program to share his expertise on the subject of graphology, or handwriting analysis. Bem was appearing as a skeptic, the main attraction being a gentleman who, for an impressive fee, performs handwriting analysis for large corporations to help them with personnel selection. For each exciting claim made by the graphologist, Bem countered with a sobering statement from the research literature about the severe limitations on what a sample of a person’s handwriting can really tell us.

Because of a late-breaking news story, Bem and his counterpart did not appear live, but their segment of the show was taped to be shown later that week. In the interim, however, the producers thought better of the idea. The program just was not sufficiently “interesting.” All they had was a discussion in which one person made a number of exciting claims, only to have them shot down by the other. Bem has concluded that CBS would have had a much “better” show if he had not been invited—a show they would have been more inclined to air. Although one cannot be anything but pleased by CBS’s original decision to include a skeptical perspective, the cancellation tells us a great deal about the kind of presentation of such subjects that we are likely to receive from mainstream media. Flashy stories that promote the existence of special capacities tend to be well received by the general audience, and therefore are likely to be shown. More balanced accounts that take a hard look at these extraordinary claims are less likely to be aired.

In addition to satisfying the requirement that a communication be worthy of the listener’s attention, telling an entertaining story also accomplishes another common communicative goal: It promotes the speaker’s narrow self-interest. To tell an entertaining story is to be an entertaining person. Doing so enhances the speaker’s public image. But the desire to be seen as an entertaining person is only one kind of self-interest. People pursue a host of more selfish motives in the process of communication, pursuits that may lead them to distort their messages in systematic ways.

One such motive stems from the fact that people frequently have some ideological or theoretical ax to grind. People are often interested in getting others to believe a certain way, a goal that can lead to selective sharpening and leveling. The distorted accounts of the dangers of marijuana and cocaine that were discussed earlier are good examples. Because the powers-that-be assume that significant segments of the population are incapable of evaluating the true risks of these drugs, the risks are exaggerated in an attempt to turn potential users away. Again, a “greater truth” takes precedence over the literal truth. A number of people have argued that similar distortions underlie the efforts to portray the AIDS epidemic as a significant threat to the heterosexual population in the United States. The proponents of this view note that the oft-predicted “breakout” of AIDS into the heterosexual population has never materialized. Nor, it is said, was it ever likely to, given the sexual practices of most heterosexuals and the difficulty of transmitting the AIDS virus through penile-vaginal or penile-oral intercourse.
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Accentuating the risk to heterosexuals, however, served two political agendas. First, from the standpoint of the gay community, it prevented people from thinking of AIDS as “just a gay disease.” This, in turn, would further the worthy goals of increasing society’s willingness to spend money on AIDS research and preventing an increase in discrimination against gays. The second agenda served by heterosexualizing AIDS was that of moral conservatives who wanted to rein in society’s sexual habits and practices. It was their fervent hope that people would simply become too scared to engage in anything but monogamous sex in the context of marriage. AIDS could thus be used to instill “morality” in the same way that syphilis was used at the turn of the century. At that time, some of those with a moralizing bent did not want to see a cure for syphilis developed because one of their most potent weapons in the battle for sexual restraint would be lost. Said one, “I believe that if we could in an instant eradicate the diseases, we would also forget at once the moral side of the question, and would then, in one short generation, fall wholly under the domination of animal passions, becoming grossly and universally immoral.”
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For the threat of AIDS to be an effective deterrent to sexual freedom, however, it could not be seen as a threat that was largely confined to gay or bisexual men, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and the heterosexual partners of such individuals. As a consequence, apparent cases of heterosexual transmission were publicized with great fanfare, as were the rates of infection among heterosexuals in Africa and Haiti. Far less publicized were the facts that the overwhelming majority of heterosexual transmissions did in fact involve the partners of members of one of these high risk groups, and that the sexual practices and state of public health in Haiti and Africa are so different from those in the United States that their experiences may tell us little about what is likely to happen here.

Turning to a less grave example, the case of Little Albert also illustrates how distortions can be introduced through self-interest—theoretical self-interest in this case. Authors interested in promoting a purely behaviorist account of human learning tended to introduce distortions to the effect that Albert’s fear generalized to other objects according to their similarity to the rat along a number of dimensions. Thus, Albert has been erroneously reported to have developed rather negative reactions to white objects, like a white glove, and to furry objects, like his mother’s fur coat. Later on, however, when the advocates of “preparedness” theory argued that organisms are predisposed to learn certain associations and not others, Albert’s fear was said to have generalized mainly along the dimension of furriness and animalness dictated by evolutionary considerations.
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This revisionist account appears to capture more accurately what happened during Watson and Raynor’s experiment, but it too has been shaped by the processes of sharpening and leveling. For instance, Albert is now said to have developed a phobic reaction to “rats, rabbits, and other furry objects” that did “not extinguish readily.”
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This is hard to reconcile with the fact that Albert was only tested with respect to a single rat and a single rabbit, and, as we have already seen, the evidence that any of his fears was long-lasting is extremely dubious.

There are times when inaccurate or fictitious stories are told and retold because they just seem so plausible. When what we hear could so easily be true, we often let down our critical guard, accept what we are told, and pass it on as is. Our standards for what is plausible, furthermore, are not always so high: Sometimes all that is necessary is a sense of ironic plausibility. This is presumably what was responsible for the widely circulated rumor (circa 1988) that Bobby McFerrin, the creator of the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” committed suicide. A similar sense of ironic plausibility (as well as the sense that somehow it
ought
to be true) no doubt underlies the continual reappearance, in print, of the claim that an official of the U.S. Patent Office once resigned his post because he thought there was nothing left to invent.
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Although this tale has appeared numerous times over the past century, there never was any such official. Still, it seems like something someone, at some time, might do.

A less ironic, but similarly playful story that also owes its existence to its superficial plausibility involves an irrepressible tale of the verbosity of government bureaucrats. The most common version of the story, begun in the early 50s, runs as follows. “The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Declaration of Independence is stated in 300 [sic] words. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent directive by the Office of Price Stabilization to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.” In reality, never in its entire existence from January 1951 to April 1953 did the OPS ever regulate the price of cabbage. Nevertheless, repeated attempts by OPS officials to bring this to the public’s attention were unsuccessful in squelching the story. Equally ineffective in halting its spread was the demise of OPS itself. The story was still appearing in newspapers in the mid-1960s, but with the attribution to the OPS changed to “a federal directive.”
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The robust life of this fallacious story is no doubt partly traceable to its plausibility. Government officials are known to be long-winded, and government regulations are often impossibly complex. Why wouldn’t there be such a detailed and verbose regulation? It fits people’s sense of what easily could happen, and so it is readily passed on.

Thus far, all of the tales attributed to considerations of plausibility—the suicide of Bobby McFerrin, the limited vision of the patent official, and the incredible length of the cabbage regulation—are rather whimsical. This is fitting. The most common type of story that is accepted and spread because of its plausibility is one that is also entertaining and not particularly serious. The desire to entertain (and be entertained), and the sense that something is plausible, combine to foster the diffusion of a number of false rumors. Beliefs obviously vary in their importance and in the conviction with which they are held. Some have important consequences and are deeply held; others are less serious. For the latter, it is not so much that we
have
a belief, but that we
entertain
the belief and entertain ourselves with it. It is this kind of belief that is most easily spread through the rumor mill and for which its plausibility and entertainment value are nearly sufficient for its acceptance.