Iraq War Mind Tricks

March 15th, 2005 at 13:17 Björn Hallberg

Psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues at the University of Western Australia published a study in the March issue of  Psychological Science, detailing how Iraq war stories played tricks on the mind. The study, based on 800 people from Australia, the US and Germany, is a quite fascinating account of how beliefs and memories are formed, with regard to non-sceptics and sceptics.
Not so surprising perhaps, those that did not agree with the terms and reasons for the war also showed more healthy scepticism towards information that they were fed.

"The results showed there were far fewer sceptics in the US than in Germany and Australia. And that such sceptics were less likely to believe statements that they knew had been retracted than those people classified as non-sceptical." Also … "People do not discount corrected information unless they are suspicious about it or unless they are given some other hypothesis with which to interpret the information."

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