Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 118

Have you ever sat in class and thought to yourself “I understand what my professor is saying, but I just don’t believe her”? Would you believe me, your textbook author, if I argued that in order to understand a statement you must first believe it to be true? If accurate, this would imply that you “can’t NOT believe everything you read” (Gilbert, Tafarodi, & Malone, 1993). Furthermore, if this tendency is real, it suggests another obstacle to separating truth from lies.

In a set of clever studies, social psychologist Dan Gilbert and his colleagues have garnered substantial evidence for this rather surprising claim. In one study, Gilbert et al. (1993) provided participants with both true and false statements about two local crimes. Participants were informed as to which statements were true and which false, and half of the participants read these statements under conditions of divided attention, which required that they work on a different task at the same time. The crucial question was whether the false statements would influence the assignment of prison sentences. If the participants were able to identify and reject the false statements, then the false statements should not have affected the lengths of the prison sentences. However, when asked to assign prison sentences for the suspects, false statements that made the crime appear more severe led to much longer prison sentences, but only for the divided attention participants. The reason is that the divided attention participants were not able to ignore statements that they knew to be false. What this and related research has shown is that the mere act of comprehension—simply understanding a statement—requires believing, at least for a moment.

According to Gilbert (1991), the decision to reject a claim by decertifying its validity and thereby declaring it false happens in a second step, following the initial comprehension and acceptance. The divided attention participants lacked the cognitive resources to “unbelieve” the false statements and were unable to move onto the second step and reject the false arguments. Therefore, only in retrospect can one decide that a statement is false.

More broadly, Gilbert has argued that our mental systems must believe that a statement is true in order to comprehend it—to understand what it means. We can’t NOT believe it is true before deciding it is false. Believing is the default or automatic process that occurs upon comprehension. The controlled process—rejecting the claim—only becomes operative if the available mental resources are sufficient to make the extra effort. A good everyday example of this is a person—we’ll him call Steve—who always sets his watch ten minutes early. One morning at the coffee shop Steve glances at his watch and panics—swearing profusely about being late for class—but almost immediately realizes that he actually has ten minutes to spare, which is plenty of time to walk across campus. Steve initially “believed” his watch before he unbelieved it! The same is true when you hear your professor say that people automatically believe everything they hear—you have to believe the claim before you can reject it!