How We Know What Isn't So (16 page)

Further evidence of the relative extremity of secondhand impressions was provided by a very different experiment in which pairs of friends were asked to identify a third (“target”) person whom one of them knew well, but the other had never met, and had only heard about from the first. The two friends then individually rated the target person on a set of trait scales chosen for their relevance to the target. As expected, more extreme ratings were made by the person who had only heard about the target from his or her friend.
¹⁶
This phenomenon frequently occurs in real life when college students meet their roommates’ parents, siblings, or childhood friends for the first time. Those who come prepared to meet an impossible ogre or the very embodiment of charm, wit, and intelligence are usually relieved to meet someone much more normal and human.

The relatively simple processes of sharpening and leveling can thus distort much of what we “know” secondhand—from secondhand impressions of other people to the reported results of scientific experiments. As these accounts are continually retold, we get further away from the original source, and whatever distortions have been introduced stand little chance of ever being corrected. An innocuous and rather charming example of the permanence of misconceptions brought about by a different sort of sharpening and leveling involves the origins of the term “Pennsylvania Dutch.” The Dutch never settled in Pennsylvania in great numbers, but the Germans did—giving rise to the term Pennsylvania Deutsch. Because of the difficulty many Americans have in pronouncing “Deutsch,” it has gradually been sharpened over the years to the more accommodating “Dutch.” As a result, large segments of the U.S. population currently believe that the ancestors of the Keystone state came from Holland. Indeed, a number of products marketed for the state’s tourist trade have a windmill displayed on the packaging to certify that it is an authentic product of the Pennsylvania “Dutch” country.
¹⁷

The distortions discussed thus far stem in part from the speaker’s attempt to meet the preconditions necessary for making the communication worthwhile for both speaker and listener. Most important, a good story should not burden the listener with too much minutia, and so, for example, many of the specific details about the objects to which Little Albert’s fears generalized were leveled out of many subsequent accounts of the experimental results. Beyond meeting these preconditions, however, there are a number of other criteria that must be met to make a communication worthwhile. Foremost among them is making the communication informative or entertaining. If the listener comes away from the communication either informed or entertained, the interaction has been worthy of his or her time and attention, and the speaker has met one of his or her most basic requirements.

One way that a message can be made to be more entertaining or more seemingly-informative is to increase its immediacy. Something that happens to someone we know can be said to have happened to us. Something that supposedly happened to someone in my uncle’s office can be described as having happened to my uncle. Often such alterations in the story are made for the speaker’s self-aggrandizement—it places him or her closer to center stage. At other times, however, the alteration is completely innocent: Making a story less remote in this way can seem to make a story more entertaining or perhaps more informative by making it more vivid and concrete.

The net effect of this exaggerated immediacy is that it is difficult for the listener to accurately gauge the reliability of the message. Accounts presented as firsthand are in fact often secondhand; those believed to be secondhand are often third-, fourth-, or fifth-hand. Returning to the story of Little Albert for a moment, part of the reason that many textbooks presented so much misinformation about this classic study is that a number of the textbook authors never read the original research reports. This is a common problem of the academic world: What is implicitly presented as secondhand is often more remote. To be sure, people are generally aware that the more links there are in a communication chain, the more likely it is that some distortion has been introduced somewhere along the line. However, if they are misled about the true source of a story, it is difficult to put this realization into practice. It is hard to adjust for the remoteness of the message if one does not know how remote it actually is. The cautionary alarms that would normally be sounded remain silent.

Sometimes the adjustment that is cut short would have been a general one: Be skeptical in direct proportion to the remoteness of the message. Other times, however, the precluded adjustment is more specific. For example, I might accept a story at face value because I heard it from someone trustworthy. Unbeknownst to me, however, he or she heard it from someone who is less credible. By treating the story as secondhand and taking into account only the credibility of the most immediate source, we run the risk of uncritically accepting too many fabricated stories and bogus claims.

Presenting (and accepting) remote accounts as if they were secondhand can be particularly misleading when it comes to estimating the commonness of some phenomenon in the general population. If eight people tell us they know somebody whose teenage child became brain damaged from playing too much Nintendo, then we may be safe in concluding that Nintendo is indeed a potentially dangerous activity. If, on the other hand, the eight people who tell us this story have only
heard of
a teenager who suffered brain damage in this way (possibly the same teenager in each case), then the problem is probably less widespread.

An interesting real-life example involves the problem of sexuality in the era of AIDS. I have heard the following story at least four times. Each time the person telling the story introduced it as something that happened to “a friend of mine,” “a friend of my brother,” or “a guy at work.” Many people I know have also heard it a similar number of times with a different cast of characters. Michael Fumento describes it as a widespread rumor in his book on heterosexual AIDS.
¹⁸
The story is as follows:

It is possible that such a nightmare did in fact happen to someone, somewhere, at some time. However, it is also possible that it is an inauthentic but plausible tale that is designed to impart a moral lesson. It is certainly the case, however, that it did not happen as many times, to as many people, nor to so many who are so closely connected to each of us, as is implied by the pervasiveness of this story. There simply are not enough women in the U.S. who: a) have AIDS, b) know they have AIDS, c) are seeking revenge from innocent targets, and d) express their vengeance in precisely this way, for all of these accounts to be true. Nevertheless, after hearing one of these stories and believing that the event happened to someone “close to home,” the danger can certainly seem to be acute.

Informativeness.
Beyond this tendency to exaggerate the immediacy of some message, the need to entertain or inform can tempt a speaker to communicate something other than the complete truth as he or she knows it. We readily acknowledge this fact when it comes to entertainment: We recognize that people will sometimes take liberties with the truth to tell a more entertaining tale, and sometimes we correct for this tendency when we interpret what we hear. We may be less savvy, however, to distortions introduced by the need to be “informative.” An audience may consider a message to be uninformative if it contains too many qualifications, and, as a result, a speaker may be inclined to omit them. This is often seen when scientific findings are reported in the news media: Promising developments are sometimes reported with important qualifications buried in remote parts of the text or omitted altogether. Press reports of studies indicating that a low-fat diet can reduce serum cholesterol, for example, almost always neglect to point out that a significant reduction in cholesterol is generally obtained only by individuals who reduce their dietary fat intake
and
take a cholesterol-inhibiting drug.
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The desire to be informative can also lead people to stretch the facts to make sure the audience gets the point. Public service campaigns often suffer from this problem. The “missing children” campaign, for example, performed a valuable public service by alerting parents to the dangers of leaving small children unattended in certain areas. However, it may have done so at the cost of generating more fear and over-protectiveness than was warranted, or at least misdirecting much of that fear. Most of the reports failed to mention that an overwhelming majority of the missing children were taken away by estranged husbands and wives, not by the strangers bent on mayhem that everyone most fears.
²⁰
The old campaigns against marijuana—exaggerated to the point of farce in films such as
Reefer Madness
—and many of the current claims about the dangers of cocaine suffer from the same problem.
²¹
The “facts” about potency, addictiveness, and prevalence are stretched beyond recognition to make a more compelling story. (Note, however, that in these examples, the goal is not just to inform, but to motivate a particular course of action—or inaction.)

Sometimes such distortions are introduced when the person simply has the story wrong and he or she sincerely believes in the literal truth of what is conveyed. Other times, however, people knowingly provide misinformation in the service of what they believe to be “the greater truth.” This happens at all levels. Parents tell their children, “Don’t get into a car driven by a stranger. A little boy down the street did that and his parents never saw him again.” There may never have been such an incident with the boy down the street, but getting into a car with a stranger is an unwise thing for children to do and if this story more effectively gets that point across, it’s all for the better. Similarly, certain drugs may not be as addictive or harmful—or affect the lives of as many people—as some public service campaigns would have us believe. Nevertheless, drug use does entail some real risks and it has ruined the lives of many individuals. If a little sharpening and levelling is necessary to drive home this greater truth, some will conclude that that is exactly what should be done.

Entertainment.
The possibility of inaccuracy obviously increases enormously when the worth of the message is measured by how well it entertains rather than how well it informs. Our appetite for entertainment is enormous, and it has a tremendous impact on the tales we tell and the stories we want to hear. The quest for entertainment is certainly one of the most significant sources of distortion and exaggeration in everyday communication. Unfortunately, psychology has not adequately come to grips with the difficult subject of entertainment (or with its opposite, boredom). Despite a few initial efforts in this regard,
²²
the discipline has not developed an adequate conceptual framework for thinking productively about what people find entertaining, why they find it so, how—and how much—the desire for entertainment governs everyday life, etc. The absence of such a framework is a noteworthy failure in an era in which people spend so much time and effort in the pursuit of entertainment—in this society surely, more time than they do in the “struggle” for survival; and, for many, more time than they do in the existential search for meaning and purpose.

Fortunately, such a framework is not necessary to examine how the desire to entertain and be entertained can introduce distortion in everyday communication. For this purpose, the most important point could hardly be more simple: The desire to entertain often creates a conflict for the speaker between satisfying the goal of accuracy and the goal of entertainment. The desire to entertain can sometimes be the stronger of the two, putting the truth in jeopardy.

Often the speaker’s desire to entertain is matched by a listener’s desire to be entertained, and an implicit understanding develops whereby the speaker need not be constrained too heavily by having to tell the absolute truth as he or she knows it. In everyday social life, this can be seen in our willingness to grant other people “literary license.” We generally have no quarrel with claims such as “I nearly died, I was laughing so hard,” or “Those were the most awesome waves anyone has ever seen around here,” as long as these claims make the account more entertaining, as long they are not too incredible, and as long as it is clear that we are “in on the game”—that permission to stretch the truth is mutually agreed upon. One of the clearest testimonials to the frequency with which people grant, and take, literary license is the fact that the word “literally” has lost its meaning in everyday use. Few seemed to mind, or even notice, for example, when Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde defended President Reagan during the 1987 “Iran-Contra” hearings by saying that “the President signed that bill with a gun
literally
pointed at his head.”

Beyond the individual or personal level, moreover, we see a similar tacit agreement that the truth can be set aside on the part of certain periodicals and their readers. This is best exemplified by the existence and financial health of tabloids like the
Sun
and the
National Inquirer
. The readers of these tabloids for some reason find the usual brew of tall tales and unsubstantiated gossip mixed with a smattering of factual stories to be well worth their entertainment/education dollar. Apparently, stories that appear under such headlines as “I Was Bigfoot’s Love Slave” or “Cannibals Shrink Alien’s Head” are sufficiently entertaining that many people consider the “transaction” to be worthwhile. Publisher and reader have struck a deal: The stories need not stick to the truth as long as they entertain.