If You Say It Enough Times You Can Fool All The People

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 05:01:59 GMT

clipped by: kidora
clipper's remarks: Ahhh, the power of blogs. Keep on repeating yourself, someone out there will start to believe you.

Clip Source: scienceblogs.com

A fascinating study has just found that hearing one person's opinion repeated is almost as effective as hearing several different people's opinions.

Repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient's sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is.

The researchers had over a thousand student volunteers read statements that were supposed to represent opinions of members of a group. In some cases, they read statements attributed to three different people, but in other cases, the identical statements were attributed to a single person. In both cases, the students believed that the statements represented the opinion of the entire group more frequently compared to when they read one statement attributed to a single individual.

Tags: science, psychology, study

Clipmarks | kidora's 'psychology' clips

If You Say It Enough Times You Can Fool All The People