When Repetition Turns Lies Into Truth

What happens when the fictional becomes plausible and the criminal becomes desirable?

This is Part Two in a four part series taken from Timothy Snyder’s book, “On Tyranny.” Read Part One here.

Snyder says the second way truth dies is through what he calls “shamanistic incantation”. Shamans use rhythmic chanting to enter into a trance. The endless repetition of lies has it’s own way of creating a nationwide trance.

As the German philologist Victor Klemperer noted in The Language of the Third Reich), the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.

The Illusory Truth Effect

People are more likely to believe a false statement is true if they hear it over and over again.

The concept connects to propaganda techniques often linked to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

During the 2016 US Presidential election, one candidate made systematic use of nicknames such as “lyin’ Ted” and “crooked Hillary.” In 2024 the same candidate used “sleepy Joe.”

Snyder says, “Through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies in 2016, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.”

Plausability

A team led by Lisa Fazio of Vanderbilt University set out to test how the illusion of truth effect interacts with our prior knowledge. Would it affect our existing knowledge?

They used paired true and un-true statements, but also split their items according to how likely participants were to know the truth. For example, “The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” is an example of a “known” items, which also happens to be true. “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” is an un-true item, for which people are likely to know the actual truth.

Their results show that the illusion of truth effect worked just as strongly for known as for unknown items.

The conclusion was prior knowledge won’t prevent repetition from swaying our judgments of plausibility.

Frustrated?

Are you frustrated with friends or family who believe things that are clearly made fictional? How can they not see reality? Check their networks.

On digital platforms, repeated sharing within closed networks creates communal reinforcement, where a claim is perceived as true simply because many people in an echo chamber keep repeating it.

Have you ever wondered where the idea that mainstream media is untrustworthy comes from?

In the 1980s and 1990s, in the US, the end of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine allowed opinion-driven radio and the launch of Fox News (1996) and MSNBC. These networks realized that questioning the traditional, established news helped build loyal audiences.

It worked.

Did it work on you?

Part 3 is coming soon.

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