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The truthiness is out there, study finds

By: Randy Boswell

Posted: 09/1/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

A study by scientists in Canada and New Zealand has found U.S. news satirist Stephen Colbert's concept of "truthiness" -- the idea that gut feelings frequently trump facts when people form their opinions -- is a real phenomenon, as demonstrated by experiments in which the mere placement of a "decorative" photograph alongside a false statement was often enough to persuade research subjects to believe it.

A team of five scientists from British Columbia's Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the University of Victoria and New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington conducted experiments involving more than 250 undergraduate psychology students from the countries. In one round of tests, students were asked whether they believed a written statement that claimed a certain celebrity -- author Stephen King, for example -- was dead. Other students were asked the question after being shown the same written statement adorned by a photo of King.

The results showed the picture -- while offering no proof of whether King (who is alive at age 64) was living or dead -- led a significant number of students to believe the statement.

It didn't matter whether the claim was genuinely true or false or whether the individual was said to be alive or dead. In each set of experiments, the presence of a picture (and in other tests, a written description of the person) was credited with convincing a statistically significantly proportion of students to believe a stated claim -- a phenomenon even more pronounced when the individual asked about was considered a relatively obscure celebrity, as New Zealand prime minister John Key was for the Canadian students.

The study was published in the latest issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

"We wanted to examine how the kinds of photos people see every day -- the ones that decorate newspaper or TV headlines, for example -- might produce 'truthiness,'" New Zealand researcher Eryn Newman, the lead author of the paper, said in an overview of the study.

The results were replicated when students responded to claims about general knowledge (some true and some false), such as "the liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium" (it's mercury), "giraffes are the only mammals that cannot jump" (they can) or "turtles are deaf" (they aren't).

In the paper, the authors credit Colbert, late-night host of the mock-news program The Colbert Report, for defining truthiness as "truth that comes from the gut, not books."

-- Postmedia News

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 1, 2012 A17

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