Following Up: More on Michelle Obama and the Power of Rumors

[Joanne98]

06.28.08 | by Bernie Heidkamp

I posted last week about on the power of rumors in this year’s presidential campaign — about how this old-fashioned tactic has taken on new meaning in the digital age. Two subsequent articles have done a great job of explaining the reasons why and how rumors work.

In a New York Times op-ed, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, experts on how the brain processes memory, discuss how a false rumor — such as that Barack Obama, a Christian, is a Muslim — is very hard to get out of your mind, even after you have been presented with and recognize the truth. Scary stuff:

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

It’s a mind-opening read.

And from another angle, Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post discusses the latest work on political rumors by Danielle Allen at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (yeah, it’s the free-wheeling genius think tank that was once the research home of Albert Einstein). Allen, an expert in the “the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn,” became obsessed with how the rumor of Obama being a Muslim — specifically, the chain e-mail about it that became viral — began and spread.


It’s a great, long piece that includes a video interview with Allen and most usefully, a rumor timeline.

Even in an online world where it’s impossible to find the absolute source of something like a chain e-mail, Allen was able to show how a few conservative activists and websites were able to start and foment the lie.

I have also posted a couple of times recently on the power of Michelle Obama’s amiable personality. Erin Aubry Kaplan of Salon, however, does a much better job of explaining the promise and complications involved in having such an accomplished black woman in such a potentially powerful role.

Kaplan’s analysis — and her personal reflections — break down the subtle stereotypes that motivates the reactions of both individual voters and the culture at large:

Portrayed by the media as extraordinary, Michelle at heart is an ordinary black woman whose life experience and ambiguity about making it in white America resemble those of every other 40ish, middle-class black woman I know. This is wonderful news for us — we finally see an accurate reflection of ourselves in someone who may one day occupy the most exclusive address in the country. But for a good part of the nation, this is exactly the problem. Michelle’s frankness about the ills of America and how they’re connected to race taps into an anxiety about such a story becoming prominent and representing us all. Like so much about the whole Obama phenomenon, this has never happened. The black story has always been marginal by definition; now, suddenly, it isn’t. And Michelle’s is a story that’s much more nuanced and challenging than the hardcore urban tales or middle-class fantasies we’re used to ascribing to all black folk. Michelle’s very presence is forcing the possibility of an enormous paradigm shift we’ve never had to make — that is, from whites at the top assessing blacks in America to blacks at the top assessing America itself. Not exactly flattering, right? Not quite what happened in high school history, right? No wonder people are at a loss.

Not just people, but also the media.

Now, this is something really worth spreading

http://www.poppolitics.com/archives/2008/06/michelle-obama-and-the-power-of-rumors

More reasons why the smears have to be attacked early and hard.

[Mz Pip]

1. This is exactly the reason

why I wish DU were a bit more tolerant of our posting the rw hate emails that our relatives and co workers send us. I have put together some fabulous replies, thanks to DUers and their quick snarky minds. Just hitting the delete button sort of tells the sender that you either agree or you have nothing for a response.

Snopes is good but this stuff is being created faster than snopes can deal with it.

I posted a real nasty one a few weeks ago and it got locked. Someone else posted one and got tombstoned (maybe he was a concern troll) but I would have loved to have seen some edgy DU responses to the crap.

Maybe we need to assign such emails to the Propganda Debunking Forum a bit more often rather than just lock the threads.

Just my two cents.

[Joanne98]

2. That's a good idea. Ignoring them is not going to work.

It just let's them circulate longer and get stuck in the brain. If we had a debunking forum we could create counter-emails. Even hit send all and send them back in the ether. We could also research them to see if we can find the source. It's a great idea.

[Mz Pip]

4. There is a Propoganda Debunking Group

but it doesn't get much traffic. Maybe 'offensive' emails should be moved by the mods to that group.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=284

[blogslut]

5. Don't forget

http://www.fightthesmears.com

[Joanne98]

3. Source Amnesia

Source amnesia is an explicit memory disorder in which someone can recall certain information, but do not know where or how it was obtained.


Source amnesia neuropsychological association diagram with partial information processing and long term memory organization chart.<1>The disorder is particularly episodic, where source or contextual information surrounding facts are severely distorted or unable to be recalled. Via the use of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) developed by Esta Berg in 1948, Positron Emission Tomography (PET), and explicit and implicit memory tests, researchers have performed extensive empirical research on source-amnesiacs and concluded or suggested neuropsychological genesis.

Daniel Schacter and Endel Tulving have each proposed that memory for facts is differentiated from memory for context. The neuropsychological implications as in brain maturation, deterioration in the normal aging course, and damage are conveyed. The organic deterioration of the frontal lobes in the process of normal aging has a greater influence on episodic memory than perhaps premature lobes in young children. Source amnesia has the ability to alter one's confidence in their memory encoded in differing conditions (i.e. conscious state or in dreaming), as in memory distrust syndrome, an inclusive disorder. Source amnesia was first presented and examined in the hypnotic environment, and further understanding the human memory process is essential in unraveling this condition.

As source amnesia prohibits recollection of the context specific information surrounding facts in experienced events, there is also the inclusive case of confusion concerning the content or context of events, a highly attributable factor to confabulation in brain disease. Such confusion was termed memory distrust syndrome by Gudjonsson and MacKeith.

A condition similar to source amnesia sometimes occurs in dreams, when the dreamer has some knowledge about details of the imaginary environment but has no idea how they learned this information.


References
^ Lakhan, Shaheen (2006) Neuropsychological Generation of Source Amnesia: An Episodic Memory Disorder of the Frontal Brain. Journal of Medical and Biological Sciences. 1:1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_amnesia

Source Amnesia, Fantasy blends Reality:

Sometimes, people forget when, where and how they obtained information. This is known as source amnesia. You are able to recall events, however, not sure how you learned about them. The failure to remember the correct source of information causes us great confusion. It is often the cause for false re-collections and confabulation/distortion of memory.

For example, your friend told you about his bike trip to Wisconsin. A year later, you recall details about the trip, however, you are not sure about how you learned about the details. You may falsely conclude that you have traveled to Wisconsin. You may reason that you recall things so clearly, you must have been there yourself. The source of the information - your friend - is forgotten, and the second-hand information is integrated in your memory.

Or maybe your friend told you that apples are bad for you because they are high in fat. You may later recall the fact, and wonder how you learned about it. You conclude that you learned it from TV or the news paper article. You may avoid eating apples believing that they are high in fat. (In reality, apples contain no fat). You give the knowledge more weight if you believe you learned about it from credible media instead of an unreliable friend.

If source amnesia is carried too far, you may recall fictional information as your own memory. For example, if your mom decided to tell you a story when you were a young child. She made up a character - your imaginary uncle - owner of a bakery - and told you many stories about the shop and watching him make cakes. Later, you may recall having him, and you might add fictional details to the episodes you remember from your mother's stories. For you, the imaginary uncle is as real as any of your real relatives. You assimilated the information to be your own recollection. Or you just imagined having a friend when your were young. You thought of many things you did with your friend. Later, you may recall these imaginary episodes as real. Visualization of events often leads to false recollections. Because the same brain regions are involved in both visual imagery and visual perception, you are susceptible to perceive visual images as real recollections. In any case, you've forgotten you've just imagined them. Your source is lost, so your ability to tell the imaginary from the real.

Your own recollection of the imaginary character in your childhood may add to your happiness and to the quality of your childhood. There will be no harm for you to believe they were real. However, source amnesia can be great obstacles in legal cases where it is absolutely essential to separate facts from imagined or falsely remembered. Children's are exceptionally susceptible to source amnesia. They are easily influenced by suggestive interrogations, and known to give false recollections easily. They are ready to tell the stories they just heard from adults as their own.

Also, taken to it's extreme, source amnesia leads to a loss of reality. What if you believe you were abducted and raped s a child? In reality, you saw a documentary about a child who was abducted and raped on TV? What if you believe you were adopted. In reality, you just wanted to escape from your family and wanted to have your real loving family somewhere else waiting and looking for you? Are you about to go into a search for a phantom (your imaginary) family you created in your mind?

Our minds are powerful enough to re-write our pasts. The truth, is beyond reach when you live in your self-serving make-believe fantasies. You hold the truth, however, you fabricated it for yourself.

Source(s): Daniel L. Schacter, "Searching for memory: the brain, the mind, and the past", (New York, 1996).

http://www.evl.uic.edu/sugimoto/memSrc.html