We think we like being turned on, but it’s apparently much, much easier to turnoff. How familiar is this? An essay from the Guardian, resurfaced by like minds:
Thought-terminating cliches exist, of course, in every language. In China, some government officials are known to exploit the phrase “Mei banfa”, meaning “No solution”, or “There’s nothing to be done” to justify inaction. The saying “Shouganai”, a linguistic shrug of resignation similar to “It is what it is”, is similarly weaponised in Japan. The Polish idiom “Co wolno wojewodzie, to nie tobie, smrodzie” roughly means “People in positions of power can get away with anything” (hence, don’t bother putting up a fight). According to Walter Scheirer, author of A History of Fake Things on the Internet, thought-terminating cliches commonly carry a defeatist flavour. It’s hard work, involving psychological friction, to figure out the best way to think about complex subjects such as climate policy or geopolitics. Any licence to give up the struggle is going to be appealing.
Tobia Spampatti, a decision scientist at the University of Geneva, argues that such phrases become especially problematic when wielded by politicians with decision-making power. In 2023, Australian conservatives used the rhyming slogan “If you don’t know, vote no” to discourage citizens from supporting a constitutional amendment that would have afforded Indigenous people representation in parliament. Spampatti, who studies the relationship between information processing and beliefs about climate change, says disinformation tends to spike around major events, like elections and climate deals. That’s when thought-terminating cliches do their wiliest work. Examples used to squash environmental efforts range from “Climate change is a hoax” and “Scientists have a political agenda” to “Climate change is natural” (or the related “The climate has always changed”), “Humans will adapt” and “It’s too late to do anything now”.
Unfortunately, mere awareness of such tricks is not always enough to help us resist their influence. For this, we can blame the “illusory truth effect” – a cognitive bias defined by the unconscious yet pervasive tendency to trust a statement simply because we have heard it multiple times. Memory scientist Lisa Fazio has found that we are so primed to confuse a statement’s familiarity with veracity that the bias persists even when listeners are warned to look out for it, even when they are explicitly told the source was untrustworthy. “Some of these cliches catch on not necessarily because we believe them to be true but because they feel comfortable and are easy to understand,” she says.
Do continue reading (also operative as a general admonition). We are all decision scientists now.
Image: Boat Racer, from the Occupations for Women series for Old Judge and Dogs Head Cigarettes, Metropolitan Museum of Art