I: A Marketing 300 lecture

In the winter of 2019, I took MKT 300 as required by my business degree. The research interests of the professor, Dr. Carolyn Yoon, lived in the intersection of neuroscience and marketing.¹

Within her interests, how does presentation affect people's ability to internalize the message of an informational campaign (e.g. PSA debunking myths)? In one lecture, Professor Yoon provided an example that really piqued my interest: a CDC poster of facts and myths regarding the flu vaccine. Professor Yoon explained that after a while, the “false” or “not” component of the message sometimes faded away, potentially backfiring on the attempt to clear falsehoods.

I loaded this story in the back of my mind, ready to deploy it in conversations about misinformation.

II: Misinformation

This example exists as part of a larger movement within the social sciences focused on misinformation. “We live in a post-truth world!” some decry. In this view, seeds of this post-truth lie in the faults of our psychology: bias toward what already fits in our worldview, and penchant to remember the content more than the origin of information. And these foul seeds get fertilized by relatively new technologies: the Internet democratizes wide platforms regardless of credibility, and social networking sites enables ideas to spread faster than ever.

Studies within this movement evoke our fear of the world as we want it declining. They feed us upsetting reasons as to why this person would get elected, or why these people would say these things and get positive attention from others.

III: LOL Something Matters

This week, while mindlessly browsing, I came across an article that really piqued my interest: “LOL Something Matters” on Slate. As author Daniel Engber asserts: “We’ve been told that facts have lost their power, that debunking lies only makes them stronger, and that the internet divides us. Don’t believe any of it.”

In “LOL Something Matters,” Engber argues that the studies fueling the post-truth view above exhibit questionable scientific rigor. They suffer from small or un-representative samples, and, more importantly, the results don't reproduce. One such study, co-authored by Dr. Carolyn Yoon (who you should recognize), investigated how students responded to a CDC poster of facts and myths regarding the flu vaccine. Engber details multiple attempts to reproduce the finding that debunking backfires failed. Engber also notes a larger study by Wood and Porter of over 10,000 subjects did not find any backfiring across 52 contentious issues.

IV: Me

So here we lie, by coincidence or providence. For many months, I internalized the message that debunking can backfire. And now we've added a debunking to that message. Will debunking debunking debunking backfire?