Thursday, December 7, 2023

Facts and Truth Matter

Just because you like what you hear doesn’t make it real—even when you’ve heard it before

By André van Heerden, Communications Director

Famed English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon famously wrote, “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.”

In today’s polarized world of opinions and statements, his words never seem more appropriate. However, we could add to his insight by stating that people prefer to believe what they hear most often.

One might think that this would only apply to things like politics and religion where the difference in people’s worldview drastically affects how they understand and react to news and events. But it turns out that people’s understanding of what is true—even on noncontroversial and nondebatable topics—is impacted by what they hear the most often.

In a 2019 study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, researchers found that “repetition increases the likelihood that a statement will be judged as true. Our results indicate that the illusory truth effect is highly robust and occurs across all levels of plausibility. Therefore, even highly implausible statements will become more plausible with enough repetition.”

This obviously has huge implications as really anyone could be tricked into believing anything just through repetition. I know I immediately want to argue that I wouldn’t believe something if it was morally wrong or obviously nonfactual, but multiple examples both past and present would prove me wrong.

It is extremely ironic and telling that a famous quote attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels doesn’t seem to actually have been said by him: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. . . . It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

As Emily Dreyfuss wrote in an article for Wired Magazine, “the effect works because when people attempt to assess truth they rely on two things: whether the information jibes with their understanding, and whether it feels familiar. The first condition is logical: People compare new information with what they already know to be true and consider the credibility of both sources. But researchers have found that familiarity can trump rationality—so much so that hearing over and over again that a certain fact is wrong can have a paradoxical effect. It’s so familiar that it starts to feel right.

"‘When you see the fact for the second time it’s much easer to process—you read it more quickly, you understand it more fluently,’ says Vanderbilt University psychologist Lisa Fazio. ‘Our brain interprets that fluency as a signal for something being true’—Whether it’s true or not. In other words, rationality can be hard. It takes work. Your busy brain is often more comfortable running on feeling.”

One of the lies CLAC hears repeatedly is that we’re not a real union. CLAC has been recognized as a labour union, as defined by the applicable labour relations legislation by labour boards in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, BC, and by the federal Canada Industrial Relations Board. It has 22 active independent affiliated locals, over 900 current collective agreements successfully negotiated, voted on, and ratified, and over 8,000 since 1952.

It also has over 3,000 bargaining unit certificates granted by provincial and federal labour boards and is part of the international labour movement as an affiliated member of the World Organization of Workers. CLAC represents over 60,000 workers and has the same status at law as any other labour union in Canada. And yet there are still articles out there stating that we’re not a real union.

Interestingly, when I’ve had the chance to challenge someone who heard I worked for CLAC and said that it wasn’t a real union, it wasn’t hard to convince them otherwise. The list of proofs above were a surprise to them and couldn’t be argued against.

Sometimes, they’ll counter by saying that CLAC isn’t real because it won’t go on strike. CLAC will in fact go on strike as a last resort for the right reasons and proved that most recently on November 1, 2023, as we went on strike with educational assistants in Steinbach, Manitoba.

Hopefully, those who learn the truth will repeat it to others. Facts matter. Truth matters. Checking what you’re being told is important.

Just because you like what you hear doesn’t make it real—even when you’ve heard it before. The best way to stop both the big lie and the little lie and all the lies in between is only to repeat what you know for certain is true. CLAC is a real union—pass it on!

Facts and Truth Matter

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