1. The side effects of getting a flu vaccine shot are worse than the flu.
True or false?
2. Only older people need flu vaccine.
True or false?
Both of these statements are false. They are also common myths.
Much to the shock of the folks at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more people believed this folklore AFTER they had read a CDC educational flyer about the facts than before.
Within a half hour, “older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true.” Worse yet, “ Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual,” according to social psychologist Norbert Schwarz in a story by Shankar Vedantam at the Washington Post.
Adds Vedantam, “Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.”
It seems that the very denial – debunking false advice and urban myths – has a counter-intuitive effect. From many peer-reviewed studies, such attempts to educate people simply deepen people’s belief in the original myth.
As Vedantam points out, that’s probably why so many Americans still believe that Iraq was directly involved in the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Or why many Arabs believe the Jews were behind the plane attacks on the World Trade Center.
Such deeply-held beliefs seem familiar and stick in our mind, as Dan and Chip Heath point out in their popular book, Ideas That Stick.
Perhaps we cling to myths because they seem intuitively right - and they become ever more vividly familiar than the truth when they are repeated, even in an attempt to "educate" us. Learn how you might be mislead or otherwise manipulated by reading the best book on the topic (in my humble opinion), Influence by Robert Cialdini.
