Repetition

“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Respond quickly: who is the author of this statement? The most common attribution is Abraham Lincoln, although, as often happens with quotes, there is little evidence to support this attribution. There seems to be some evidence that the statement was actually made by the seventeenth century French protestant, Jacques Abbadie (Quote Investigator, 2013; Parker, 2016). However, we have heard the attribution to Abraham Lincoln so often, that we assume it to be true.

Over the end of the year holidays I read (most of) Daniel Kahneman’s book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Kahneman, a psychologist, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 (shared with Vernon Smith) for the contributions to economics from his research on human judgement and decision-making under uncertainty. One aspect of human cognition that he describes in his book, is that we are more likely to believe what we find easy to. Various factors can contribute to our “cognitive ease”, including a clear display of the information we are exposed to, having been “primed” by association with a prior piece of information, being in a good mood, and also by repeated exposure to the information, whether that information is true or not (Kahneman, 2011, Chapter 5). 

Repetition is also often discussed as an important component in learning (see, for example, the literature on spaced repetition), change management and other aspects of our daily life that depend on our understanding and perception of reality. I once read (and never forgot) a passage in Machiavelli’s “The Prince” where he states that injuries should be inflicted at once, while benefits should be provided piecemeal, overtime, if a ruler is to ensure permanence in power. I always understood this as reflecting how repetition affects perception (Machiavelli, 1998, chapter VIII). 

Recent political discussions in the U.S. have referred to the idea of the “Big Lie,” the idea that less plausible lies are often easier to sell to the public than small ones… if sufficiently repeated (RationalWiki contributors, 2021). A recent paper by Fazio et al (2015) argues, based on a couple of experiments, that repetition of false information impacts belief even when those exposed know better, in an effect they call “knowledge neglect,” and that reflects a primacy of processing fluency (cognitive ease) over retrieval of knowledge under certain conditions which include repetition.

What do I take from the above? The more confident I am in new acquired knowledge, the more I will repeat, remind myself, to better internalize, garner the power of repetition. The less confident I am about new knowledge, the more suspicious I will be when seeing it repeated. I guess that is a new years resolution and, yes, those work: I heard it many times.

References

Fazio, L. K; N. M. Brashier; B. K. Payne and E. J. Marsh. 2015. “Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth.” In Journal of Experimental Psychology 144(5): 993-1002. Available: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/xge-0000098.pdf. Accessed: January 18, 2021

Kahneman, Daniel, 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Machiavelli, Nicolo, 1998. The Prince. The Project Gutenberg eBook. Translated by W.K.Marriott. Available: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm#chap08. Accessed: January 09, 2021.

Parker, David B., 2016. “You Can Fool All the People”: Did Lincoln Say It?. History News Network. Available: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161924. Accessed: January 09, 2021

Quote Investigator, 2013. You cannot fool all the people all the time. Available: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/11/cannot-fool/#return-note-7793-2. Accessed: January 09, 2021.

RationalWiki contributors, 2021. “Big Lie,” In RationalWiki. Available: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Big_lie. Accessed: January 09, 2021.