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Steven R. Livingstone
2004-05-04

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Home » blogs » Steven's blog

The psychology of repetition - Why the Workplace Reform commericals will fail

Steven @ Wed, 2007-09-05 11:38

The Washington Post is discussing the results of a US government disease "myths & facts"prevention advertising program. The commercial is styled exactly the same as the Australian Government's Workplace Reform (Work Choices) ad series. Unfortunately for both, the commercials have the opposite of the desired effect. Just three days after viewing the US commerical, participants believed that 40% of the myths stated in the ad were factual. The fatal mistake made in both these campaigns was ignoring the psychology of repetition.

The peculiar nature of this phenomenon first came to popular attention with a quote attributed to Joseph Goebbls "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." Whether the statement repeated is true or false does not seem to matter, what counts is how many times it is repeated. Over the last few years there has been a slew of research pointing to the importance of repetition in people believing a statement as fact [1, 2].

Repetition and the Big Lie propaganda technique, first discussed by Hitler in Mein Kampf, has been used extensively by the current White House administration. Its most forceful proponent is Dick Cheney who today still maintains the following associations are synonymous - Iraq, Al Qaeda, 9-11, WMD's. He perpetuates these myths even after the associations 'Iraq 9-11', 'Iraq Al Qaeda', 'Iraq WMD' long ago had been repeatedly dismissed as false by the CIA and many others.

Filed under: Science
 
NFG (not verified)
Wed, 2007-09-05 14:02
 

The article doesn't seem to take into account the kind of advertisement used. It doesn't seem to me that repitition is the problem, but that the kind of ad isn't effective.

For example, this article could simply be pointing out that the ads are mixing true and false statements, and people are confusing the myths and truths. If the ad only dealt with one or the other perhaps it would be more easily remembered.

Repeating things often is one thing, but a strong message would have more effect.

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Steven
Wed, 2007-09-05 14:13
 

That is a very good point, the article did not provide detail on the exact nature of the leaflet in question. However, the ad template "respond to myth with accurate information" usually entails a repetition of the myth followed by the fact. It is this property that would have been studied through a variety of experiments to rule out such biases (I'd need to track down the studies to confirm this, but multiple peer-review studies would have done this).

I think you're absolutely right on the big and repetition being distinct. There is more going on than simply repetition when it comes to memory, how strongly that message is put across - how believable the communicator is plays a big role.

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