Illusion

      One must wait an hour after eating before going swimming to prevent cramping.

      Going outside with wet hair on a cold day will cause one to catch a cold.

      We swallow multiple spiders each year while sleeping.

      If you touch a baby bird, its mother will abandon it because of the smell.

      Handling toads or frogs will give one warts.

      Many people believe the five statements above to be true. In actuality, none of them are; they have all been debunked by scientific fact. The belief in the veracity of the assertions is the result of hearing them repeatedly stated, often by persons to which authority is ascribed. After all, parents, teachers, clergypersons, political leaders, and such wouldn’t propagate falsehoods . . . would they?

      This phenomenon, studied and documented by psychologists and behavioral scientists, is called the illusory truth effect, a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth.. It describes how when we hear the same false information repeated again and again, we often come to believe it is true.

      Believing and ordering one’s behavior on the five examples above is relatively inconsequential in

the big picture of life. But there are beliefs that lead to all kinds of  horrific consequences. Such as:

          All Jews are evil, ergo, they need to be exterminated.

          God wants parents to beat (literally) good behavior into their children.

          A particular individual was ordained by God to tell me what to do, and nonconformity

                  will lead to certain hell.

      Example of the latter: A mass murder-suicide took place in 1978 at the Peoples Temple's, a remote settlement in Guyana. The event resulted in the deaths of over 900 people who were convinced that the leader, Jim Jones, was to be believed and his instructions explicated followed.

      The key word used repeated above: belief. Believing something to be true does not make it so. One might fiercely believe, for instance, that the earth is flat. While that might appear to be true for the misunderstanding individual, it does not alter the fact that the earth is spherical.

      Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, infamously stated that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. This happens with increased frequency when the falsehood reinforces what one wants to hear . . . when it validates our prejudices and presuppositions.

      Often people base life decisions and actions on beliefs that are antithetical to actual facts. In many cases the consequences are relatively unimportant. But in many other instances, the result of ordering one’s life on demonstrable falsehoods can cause great harm to self and/or others.

      If your values are similar to mine, you will refuse to believe the falsehood that due to ethnic origin, skin color, or whatever, some types of people are inherently inferior to others. After all, someone might come along who believes that about you or me, and put us in a concentration camp.