It's All About Repetition, Repetition, Repetition: How Lies Work
And how to fight back.
In the 1950s, a psychologist did a little experiment.
He had 71 Stanford students perform extremely boring tasks, like turning pegs and arranging things on desks. When they finished, he paid them either $1 or $20 and asked them how they felt. Something weird happened. The participants who got paid almost nothing described the tasks as much more fun and meaningful than the ones who earned $20.
Why?
As Lee McIntyre explains in Post-Truth, it's because "their ego was at stake." They were trying to preserve some sense of agency. "To reduce the dissonance, they altered their belief that the task had been boring." But if you got $20 out of it, you felt no need to lie.
This same psychologist did a number of studies where he asked people to do things they didn't want to, like protesting for causes they didn't support. Again, he observed that people who did things they saw no value in would invent one. They would just make stuff up. They did the same thing over and over. Building on th…