Democratism Blog

Advertisers and politicians lie to us every day, often spewing the same lies again and again. There’s good reason for that: the more we hear something, the more likely we are to believe it, whether it’s true or not.

But what about if we know the truth about it already? We don’t fall for lies in that case, do we? Lisa K. Fazio and co-authors of this recent article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology designed a study to answer that question, and the result wasn’t pretty. Knowledge of the truth doesn’t protect us from the effect of repeated falsehoods.

What does this mean for democracy? How can we make wise decisions when our own knowledge of the truth is so fragile—and so vulnerable to moneyed interests who control so much of what we hear through the media?

One solution is to expand democracy, by expanding the range of decisions we make together. Electoral campaigns, by their nature, focus on only a handful of issues. That makes them into battles of repeated claims on a few points. The more repetition, the less our prior knowledge matters. Note that public finance of electoral campaigns can’t fix this, because it arises from the paucity of issues.

What we really need is a subtler system of voting, one that takes account of our views on many issues, instead of just a few. The more issues we decide, the less power to the repeaters. They can’t repeat away our knowledge of everything.