Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is often attributed as saying —
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on."

In today's society and this digital age we live in with social media, the lie can spread around the world in seconds. This creates an ongoing issue that you'll face when messaging.

Related to this, after opinion leaders send their information out and before the public forms a definitive opinion, there’s a lot of time for opinions to change and be swayed. This has been a topic of research for decades. In 2012, Australian psychologist Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky had a study published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest that explored exactly how this worked.

What Lewandowsky found was that misinformation is sticky and rejecting information requires cognitive effort. He learned that it’s harder for your brain to weigh the truth of information than to just accept it. If the topic isn’t important to you or if you have other things on your mind and can’t really pay attention, misinformation is more likely to take hold.

So what do we pay attention to?

According to Lewandowsky’s findings, people run through a series of questions subconsciously as information comes in:

Does the information fit with other things I believe in?
Does it make a coherent story with what I already know?
Does it come from a credible source?
Do others that I know (e.g., friends, family) believe it?

If the answer is “yes” to these questions, the information you hear will take hold and become how you think about a given topic.

This is not the end of the discussion, however, because it doesn’t mean opinions can’t be changed.

Lewandowsky wrote that there were strategies to fight misinformation including:

Provide people with a narrative that replaces the gap left by false information.
Focus on the facts you want to highlight, rather than the myths.
Make sure that the information you want people to take away is simple and brief.
Consider your audience and the beliefs they are likely to hold.
Strengthen your message through repetition.

Even if you do all of these things perfectly, it may not work to change public opinion. Another study in 2013 by Dr. Brendan Nyhan titled “The Hazards of Correcting Myths About Health Care Reform” explained the results of an experiment where the major finding was that successfully refuting a lie actually increases the belief in the lie among members of ideological groups predisposed to believing the lie.

So then, how do we keep people alert to the risks, but keep their fears within reason? To do that, we have to lead the way with science and data as we help people to confront their fears and present the truth in a way people can relate to.

Reference

Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3), 106–131. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612451018S.

Nyhan, B., Reifler, J., & Ubel, P. A. (2013). The Hazards of Correcting Myths About Health Care Reform. Medical Care, 51(2), 127–132. https://doi.org/10.1097/mlr.0b013e318279486b.