A Problem With Debunking Myths

I don’t know if folks saw the article, "In Heeding Health Warnings, Memory Can Be Tricky" in the NY Times (use BugMeNot if want to bypass compulsory registration), but there is some interesting organizational behavior-like research alluded to there as done by Dr. Ian Skurnik in the marketing department at the University of Toronto. Here’s a passage from the article:

"You notice that your grandmother has been taking useless medical
treatments, and you’re worried," he said. "You tell her, ‘You know,
Granny, shark cartilage doesn’t help your arthritis.’ You tell her three times to make sure she understands, and she seems to."

He
continued, "But a few days later you talk to her again and find the
warnings have had precisely the opposite effect of what you intended."
This common problem arises, Dr. Skurnik said, because in laying down a
memory trace, the human brain seems to encode the memory of the claim
separately from its context – who said it, when and other particulars,
including the important fact that the claim is not true.

While the article is about heath topics, the implications are actually more general. The basic gist (without capturing all of the necessary pre-conditions with rigor) is along the lines of this:

When you tell someone not to believe a myth, in the short-run that works to help him/her remember. In the long-run, the opposite effect can [likely] occur. The person ends up thinking the myth is true.

I find this to be an important thing to be aware of because I touch on both marketing and management consulting. Marketing tends to involve trying to be catchy, stand out, gain top of mind awareness, etc. True consulting is oriented towards having empathy and about helping a client in the long-run. When debunking myths, is seems as though there can be competing effects if one is not focused on both near-term and long-term effects (and the pre-conditions as to when things can backfire).

So is there a problem with debunking myths? Yes … if a person does not remember the context of the situation. Read more of the article to get some tips on how to get people to remember the right thing.