Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

many of us suffer from ideological “burn-in”—the unfortunate imprinting of biases from stories and exposure. Liberals cocoon themselves in left-leaning websites, and people who get their information from Twitter can design a news stream that perfectly suits their prior opinions. Intelligent formulas govern Facebook, Pandora, Netflix, and other media, which tailor the universe of options to fit a person’s prior preferences and the favorites of her in-group. This hunt for fluency and familiarity is natural, but it leaves people open to a host of dangerous biases. The power of the press is not only to report and render judgment on important issues, but also to determine which issues are worthy of coverage in the first place. That decision of emphasis has its own consequences. In the press, familiar falsehoods can be seen as positive facts, even if they’re often presented as myths. In one study of myth-busting news, old and young participants read several dubious assertions, such as, “Shark cartilage is good for arthritis.” (It is not.) Immediately after, most participants correctly identified the untrue statements as myths. But several days later, researchers checked back with their subjects and found that older adults were significantly more likely to say: Yes, shark cartilage really does help arthritis! The brute force of repetition had familiarized the connection between shark cartilage and arthritis, and older participants, with worse explicit memory, failed to separate f...