Digital Influence Warfare in the Age of Social Media by Forest James J. F.;

Author:Forest, James J. F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: ABC-CLIO, LLC
Published: 2021-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Repetition

Finally, another effective way to ensure the impact of a message is repetition. This is something well known in the world of marketing psychologists, and educators have also found that student learning is enhanced through repetition. Instead of trying to use compelling arguments in an appeal to the target’s logic, simply repeating something over and over leads them to perceive that there must be something to it. Calling someone a derogatory nickname repeatedly will have an impact, over time, on how others view that person. This is why Trump would choose a derogatory nickname for a political opponent—crooked Hilary, Lying Ted, Sleepy Joe—and repeat it at every opportunity. Over time, his supporters latched onto that characterization, as did other listeners, influencing their perceptions of that candidate.

As Pratkanis and Aaronson explain, the power of repetition in propaganda was well understood by Joseph Goebbels, the head of the Nazi propaganda ministry. His propaganda crusades were based on a simple observation: What the masses term truth is that information which is most familiar. As Goebbels put it: “The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. In the long run, only he will achieve basic results in influencing public opinion who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form despite the objections of intellectuals.” According to Goebbels, the repetition of simple messages, images, and slogans creates our knowledge of the world, defining what is truth and specifying how we should live our lives.132

The way this connects to the previous discussion about an individual’s information processing is called “fluency.”133 Basically, people are more likely to believe something to be true if they can process it fluently. The information “feels right,” so it is deemed believable by the target. In other words, easy-to-understand information is more believable, because it’s processed more fluently. This is why repetition is so powerful: if you’ve heard this information before, you process it more easily this time, and in turn, this fluency makes you more likely to believe it. And if the information is repeated multiple times, this increases the fluency effect. Further, even when the information is proven to be false, the amount of repetition of the original claim will still lead individuals to believe it.134

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