How Television Makes You Dumb

The effects of misinformation, propaganda and other forms of psychological manipulation have been studied since the 1940s. Conspiracy theorists have traced the long history of this type of “mind control”, citing the government’s MK-Ultra project andpatents that claim the brain can be influenced and manipulated by subliminal messages hidden in radio and tv broadcasts.

University of Utah’s Jacob Jensen recently published a study that revealed you don’t need electromagnetic mind control waves to skew the public’s perception. All you need to do is place your propaganda neatly between actual facts, and the human brain will do the work for you.

“Two studies have now shown that fiction (written and televised) can produce a delayed message effect,” Jensen and his colleagues write. This is troubling, they add, noting, “People are bombarded by mass media every day all over the world, and a sizeable (and growing) body of mass communication research has demonstrated that much of this content is distorted in a multitude of ways.”

Even if your initial response to information on television is skeptical, that skepticism wanes as time goes by. Your brain forgets the origin of the misinformation and without a source, falsehoods can be filed away as facts.

This is known as the sleeper effect, when one retains a piece of information but gradually forget that it came from an unreliable source. A 2004 meta-analysis confirmed this effect is highly successful in convincing people that propaganda and misinformation is factual information. Though the effect works with any medium, television and other visual medias are the easiest methods of conveying misinformation to a large audience. 

These studies show how dangerous misinformation, like every program on FOX News, can be to the general public. It is very easy to influence someone’s world beliefs by hiding falsehoods within a fact-based model (like newscasts). Be careful and think critically while seeking out the facts. Never rely on anyone’s “research” except your own.