[COG SCI] Lies that Become Belief

From Nautilus Magazine:
An interesting deep dive into an increasingly relevant phenomenon. I thought IDIOT b/c it has relevance to tons of other topics (and maybe posters -- hayoo!) in here. TL;DR: Human memory and cognition are not like tape recorders. They're very faulty and prone to corrosion from the act of telling and repeating lies.

The George Santos Syndrome.

(excerpts)
Lying and deception are perennials of politics. Machiavelli argued in the 16th century that sometimes a leader must act as a “great pretender and dissembler.” It’s easy to see such politicians as fundamentally cynical. They seem to lie in a Machiavellian attempt to win power and control. Often, no doubt, that’s true. But cognitive science suggests the possibility of something more disconcerting at play: You really can believe your own lies. Insight into the nature of memory, based on experimental work, suggests that your awareness of the truth can bend over time. Lies can feel like the truth and so, to you, they are the truth. You’re no longer deceiving others. Instead, your brain is deceiving you.

...
In the early 2000s, two other researchers published studies on the effects of lying on memory. Kerri True, a psychology professor, showed a group of undergraduates a video of a staged robbery. Part of the group was instructed to fabricate a description of the robber. One week later, all the students were asked to answer questions about what they had seen in the video. True found that fabrication corroded memory in two distinct ways. “Those who lied about the description of this character later forgot more of the [actual] details about the character,” True told me. Those students were also more likely to misremember their fabricated details as having appeared in the video. It was as though lying cemented the false details in their memory, at the expense of the real ones.

...
“When you’re fabricating lots of details, you’re going to be more likely to see source errors,” True explained to me, and “the more plausible the detail, the more likely you are to get confused about the source of it.” In other words, the more you embellish the lie, and the more believable you make it, the more likely you are to confuse yourself later that it truly happened. If you created a whole litany of things that occurred at John’s house that night in high school, the better to deceive your mother, then you are more likely to misremember that lie as the truth in the future.

Chrobak said that if a lie or fabrication provides an explanation for something, it’s more likely to become confused with what’s true. “People are causal [not casual, CF] monsters,” he told me. “We love knowing why things happen,” and if we don’t have an explanation for something, we “like to fill in the gaps.” The pressing human need to fill those gaps, Chrobak said, might also pertain to beliefs we hold about ourselves.

...
Another important factor underlying this effect is repetition. “If I tell the lie to multiple people,” True explained, “I’m rehearsing the lie.” And rehearsing a lie seems to enhance it. “The more you repeat something,” Chrobak said, “the more you actively imagine it, the more detailed and vivid it becomes,” which further exploits the brain’s tendency to conflate detail with veracity.

 

Thanks, but this is tricky and not very partisan to me actually. It some ways, it just adds to the pile of fallible human beings evidence. Some of us keep saying, "why can't everyone just be reasonable," but we keep finding out that humans are not naturally very reasonable or cognitively competent, LOL.

If you believe the research set out in this article (and they have everything referenced for those following the link), maybe certain defendants in certain cases would do well to trot out some of these findings. And it even gets to what some columns and posters have brought up about "state of mind."