Americans may lose trust in democratic process

False accusations of election fraud threaten to undermine Americans’ confidence in the democratic process in the long run, even if they recognize today that the allegations are spurious.

President Donald Trump has baselessly and repeatedly accused Democrats of “stealing” the election as officials tally more votes for his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

There is no evidence of any substantive fraud, refuting the president’s claim. But that doesn’t mean the facts will be what Americans remember.

That’s because research has shown that falsehoods tend to linger in our minds, eventually distorting our memories and influencing our opinions.

“We often remember the content of information while forgetting the source or who said it,” said Lisa Fazio, assistant professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, who has studied the effects of misinformation. “Over time, we might remember the allegations of voter fraud but forget that they came from an unreliable source.”

Take a study conducted in the early 1950s by Yale University psychologist Carl Hovland. He showed that study participants tend to believe false claims after the passage of time, even when they first knew the material to be false.

Hovland called it the “sleeper effect” – the tendency of people to forget the original source of the information but remember the content.

Think about it like this: How many times have you recounted the details of a story or a post you read on social media but have been unable to remember where you read it or who said it?

“Lies, in fact, seemed to be remembered better than truths,” Hovland wrote.

Misinformation has been used on many occasions throughout history to destabilize political systems, cause chaos and turn people against one another. In recent years, it has been used to foster uncertainty about, for example, whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States. (He was.)

Although the facts on the so-called birther conspiracy were known from the time Obama ran for president in 2008, more than half of Republicans still incorrectly believed in 2017 that he was not born in America.

One possible reason? Republican supporters of the conspiracy theory, including Trump, repeated the theory.

And lies are especially dangerous when they’re repeated many times.

In a 2011 study, cognitive psychologists Linda Henkel of Fairfield University and Mark Mattson of Fordham University examined the effects of repeated falsehoods compared with facts.

They asked participants to absorb information from a reliable source and an unreliable source. The participants consistently dubbed statements that were read to them repeatedly to be true, even when they had been told beforehand that the assertions were false.

“Statements read multiple times were perceived as more valid” regardless of their actual validity, Henkel and Mattson wrote.

When people are already eager to believe something, the effect of misinformation that confirms their biases is even worse.

Elizabeth Loftus, a University of California, Irvine professor whose research on the “misinformation effect” has demonstrated the long-lasting nature of false memories, said the combination of misinformation and confirmation bias is especially dangerous.

“What fairly recent work shows is that we are far more likely to accept misinformation when it fits with our preexisting beliefs or biases,” she said. “When people get misinformation and it contaminates their beliefs and memories, it has ripple effects, it affects their later thoughts, their later intentions, their later behavior.”

Those effects can be deadly in the case of a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization has used the term “infodemic” to describe the intersection of misinformation and the pandemic. Falsehoods such as those suggesting that masks aren’t effective against the virus are potentially fatal for people who believe them.

Loftus agreed that the president’s false claims about the validity of the 2020 election are likely to have a deleterious effect on Americans’ trust in electoral process in the long run.

“Planting false information and getting people to believe or misremember can affect their later thoughts or their later behavior – and that kind of thing is likely to happen to here,” she said.