Repeat A Lie Often Enough | the AfD landslide, violence in A&E, and AI's invented facts

The Concept of the Week is the illusory truth effect, and the news supplies three demonstrations. The AfD takes Saxony-Anhalt three seats short of a majority, 96 per cent of A&E staff have faced violence at work, and ChatGPT invents a Victorian mercury fountain and then admits it.

Show Notes

The Concept of the Week is the illusory truth effect. Repeat a lie often enough, Peter says, and it stops being something you have heard and becomes something you know. The news then obliges with three demonstrations.

The AfD has won Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote and 39 of the 83 seats, three short of a majority, on a turnout of 76 per cent. They more than doubled their share in five years and the CDU lost more than half of its own. Hilary and Peter go at what was sold to get there: nostalgia for the East German regime, a manifesto line about how children should be taught, and a traditional family message Peter reads as code for undermining everybody else's. He is blunt about where this has gone before.

Which takes them to Galton, who coined the word eugenics, walked around Britain ticking off women he judged attractive, and invented statistical tools we still use every day. And to the paper in Stephen Jay Gould's book where a man packed shot into the skulls of black people and white people and shook them until the numbers came out the way he wanted.

Then the second headline. 96 per cent of emergency department staff have faced violence or aggression at work and only 4 per cent always feel safe. Hilary reads the timing of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine's report as a deliberate play to set the agenda before a BBC investigation landed. Peter asks who benefits from an underfunded health service and is cynical about the answer. He also takes apart Hilary's use of the word simply, and later pulls her up for saying that gangs are taking over the country, which they are not, and which is about as close as this programme gets to a fight.

Third, John Healey's first big speech as Chancellor, and what a Chancellor can actually change. Peter's answer involves six thousand civil servants and some very good computers.

The Triple T is go and look for the evidence, and Peter arrives with the receipts. ChatGPT told him about a Victorian mercury fountain in St Peter's Square lit by gas lamps. He asked for a source. It said it had made the whole thing up.

Mentioned in this episode

• The AfD won Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September with 44.1 per cent and 39 of 83 seats, three short of the 42 needed. Turnout was 76 per cent, up from 60 in 2021: the full result
• The Royal College of Emergency Medicine surveyed over 2,000 emergency department staff and published on 4 September. 96 per cent had experienced violence or aggression, 75 per cent see it weekly or daily, two thirds said incidents were discriminatory, and only 41 per cent of those who reported one said their trust took meaningful action
• Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981. Peter could not remember the title on air. The skull measuring is Samuel George Morton's
• Gould's reading of Morton has itself been challenged, which rather proves the episode's point about evidence: The Mismeasure of Science, PLOS Biology, 2011
• The lab coat study Hilary asks about is Adam and Galinsky, Enclothed Cognition, 2012. Worth knowing that it has repeatedly failed to replicate: the British Psychological Society's write up
• John Healey became Chancellor on 20 July. He read Social and Political Science at Cambridge and was a full time disability rights campaigner from 1984. The judicial review announcement came in his growth speech on 7 September
• The Brexit hit to productivity Peter refers to is the Office for Budget Responsibility's standing assumption of 4 per cent over the long run: their Brexit analysis
• The protests Hilary mentions were at Dover and Portsmouth over the weekend of 5 to 7 September
• Hilary went to the wrong hall for The Rest Is Politics at Goalhanger's festival. The Royal Festival Hall is on the South Bank. The Royal Albert Hall is not
• Clearly not really: Peter calls him Edward Galton. He means Francis Galton. Everything else he says about the man, including the beauty map, is correct

Experience is hosted by Hilary Jeffs and Professor Peter Kinderman, and produced by James Jones at Granary Digital. Get in touch at [e-mail].

What is Experience: Analysing Newsmakers?

Each week, psychologist Peter Kinderman and communications expert Hilary Jeffs pick a news story and work out what's actually going on underneath it.