Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-qc88w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-02T12:21:46.538Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Misinformation and the “War on Terror”: when memory turns fiction into fact

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2009

By
Stephan Lewandowsky ,
Werner G. K. Stritzke ,
Klaus Oberauer  and
Michael Morales
Edited by
Werner G. K. Stritzke ,
Stephan Lewandowsky ,
David Denemark ,
Joseph Clare  and
Frank Morgan
Werner G. K. Stritzke
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia, Perth
Stephan Lewandowsky
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia, Perth
David Denemark
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia, Perth
Joseph Clare
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia, Perth
Frank Morgan
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia, Perth
Get access

Summary

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

(Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644))

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction”; “we know where they are.” These statements, made in 2002 and 2003 by the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, and the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, respectively, turned out to have no basis in fact when the post-invasion search for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq failed to turn up any tools of chemical or biological warfare, let alone the massive stockpiles that US officials insisted had been hidden by the Iraqi regime. Notwithstanding, polls conducted in the United States for up to a year after the invasion, by which time the absence of WMDs had become fully evident and made public, continued to reveal a persistent belief in their existence among 20% to 40% of respondents (Kull et al., 2004; PIPA, 2004). Indeed, for several months after President Bush declared the war to have ended (May 1, 2003), some 20% of respondents additionally believed that Iraq had in fact used chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield during the immediately preceding conflict (Kull et al., 2004.)

Lest one think that these figures merely represent some inertia of opinion, with those erroneous beliefs inexorably fading over time, polls conducted in March, 2006, revealed that nearly a quarter of Americans continued to believe that Iraq possessed WMDs just before the invasion (PIPA, 2006).

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Terrorism and Torture
An Interdisciplinary Perspective
 , pp. 179 - 203
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Altheide, D. L., and Grimes, J. N. (2005). War programming: the propaganda project and the Iraq war. Sociological Quarterly, 46, 617–643.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Artz, L., and Kamlipour, Y. R. (eds.) (2005). Bring ‘Em On: Media and Politics in the Iraq War. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Burnham, G., Lafta, R., Doocy, S., and Roberts, L. (2006). Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey. Lancet, 368, 1421–1428.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
,Columbia Journalism Review staff (2004). Brits vs. Yanks: who does journalism right?Columbia Journalism Review, 43(1), 44–49.Google Scholar
Deese, J. (1959). On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 17–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
,Fairness, and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) (2003). In Iraq crisis, networks are megaphones for official views. March 18. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from www.fair.org/reports/iraq-sources.html.
Fein, S., McCloskey, A. L., and Tomlinson, T. M. (1997). Can the jury disregard that information? The use of suspicion to reduce the prejudicial effects of pretrial publicity and inadmissible testimony. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 1215–1226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallo, D. A., Roberts, M. J., and Seamon, J. G. (1997). Remembering words not presented in lists: can we avoid creating false memories?Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 271–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hart, W. B., and Hassencahl, F. (2005). Culture as persuasion: metaphor as weapon. In Artz, L. and Kamlipour, Y. R. (eds.), Bring ‘Em On: Media and Politics in the Iraq War (pp.85–100). Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Group, Iraq Survey (2004). Comprehensive report of the special advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD. September. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency.Google Scholar
Jakubowicz, A., and Jacka, L. (2005). The invisible ally: Australia's war in Iraq. In Artz, L. and Kamlipour, Y. R. (eds.), Bring ‘Em On: Media and Politics in the Iraq War (pp.101–120). Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Johnson, H. M., and Seifert, C. M. (1994). Sources of the continued influence effect: when misinformation in memory affects later inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 20, 1420–1436.Google Scholar
Johnson, H. M., and Seifert, C. M. (1998). Updating accounts following a correction of misinformation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 24, 1483–1494.Google ScholarPubMed
Kamlipour, Y. R., and Snow, N. (eds.) (2004). War, Media, and Propaganda. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Kassin, S. M., and Studebaker, C. A. (1998). Instructions to disregard and the jury: curative and paradoxical effects. In Golding, J. M. and MacLeod, C. M. (eds.), Intentional Forgetting: Interdisciplinary Approaches (pp. 413–434). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Kassin, S. M., and Sukel, H. (1997). Coerced confessions and the jury: an experimental test of the “harmless error” rule. Law and Human Behavior, 21, 27–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaufmann, C. (2004). Threat inflation and the failure of the marketplace of ideas: the selling of the Iraq War, International Security, 29, 5–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kellner, D. (2004). Spectacle and media propaganda in the war on Iraq: a critique of US broadcasting networks. In Kamlipour, Y. R. and Snow, N. (eds.), War, Media, and Propaganda (pp. 69–77). Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Kull, S., Ramsay, C., and Lewis, E. (2004). Misperceptions, the media, and the Iraq War. Political Science Quarterly, 118, 569–598.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawrence, C. (2006). Fear and Politics. Melbourne: Scribe Publications.Google Scholar
Lewandowsky, S., Stritzke, W. G. K., Oberauer, K., and Morales, M. (2005). Memory for fact, fiction, and misinformation: the Iraq War 2003. Psychological Science, 16, 190–195.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lewis, J., and Brookes, R. (2004). Reporting the war on British television. In Miller, D. (ed.), Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq (pp. 132–143). London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Mather, M., Henkel, L. A., and Johnson, M. K. (1997). Evaluating characteristics of false memories: remember/know judgments and memory characteristics questionnaire compared. Memory & Cognition, 25, 826–837.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mazzoni, G., and Scoboria, A. (2007). False memories. In Durso, F. T., Nickerson, R. S., Dumais, S. T., Lewandowsky, S., and Perfect, T. J. (eds.), Handbook of Applied Cognition (2nd edn., pp. 789–812). Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
McCabe, D. P., and Smith, A. D. (2002). The effect of warnings on false memories in young and older adults. Memory & Cognition, 30, 1065–1077.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McDermott, K. B., and Roediger, H. L. (1998). Attempting to avoid illusory memories: robust false recognition of associates persists under conditions of explicit warnings and immediate testing. Journal of Memory & Language, 39, 508–520.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, D. (ed.) (2004). Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq. London: Pluto Press.
Millis, K. K., and Erdman, B. J. (1998). Comprehending news articles: updating the news. Poetics, 25, 343–361.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mooney, C. (2004). Did our leading newspapers set too low a bar for a pre-emptive attack? Columbia Journalism Review, 2 (March/April). Retrieved October 10, 2007, from http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2004/2/mooney-war.asp.
Mueller, J. (2006). Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Obermiller, C., and Spangenberg, E. (1998). Development of a scale to measure consumer skepticism toward advertising. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 7, 159–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
,Oxford English Dictionary (2000). The Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50215184?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=scepticism&first=1&max_to_show=10.Google Scholar
Payne, D. G., Elie, C. J., Blackwell, J. M., and Neuschatz, J. S. (1996). Memory illusions: recalling, recognizing and recollecting events that never occurred. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 261–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, S. (2007). An intensifying US campaign against Iran. August 24. Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from www.csmonitor.com/2007/0824/p01s01-wome.htm.
Pick, K. (2004). Vergleich der Berichterstattung in deutschen und US-amerikanischen Printmedien am Beispiel der Irak-Krise 2003. Unpublished master's thesis, Fachhochschule Stuttgart.
,Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) (2003). Americans on Iraq. July. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Iraq_Jul03/Iraq%20Jul03%20rpt.pdf.
,Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) (2004). US public beliefs and attitudes about Iraq. August. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqAttitudes_Aug04/IraqAttitudes%20Aug04%20rpt.pdf.
,Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) (2006). Americans on Iraq: three years on. March. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/mar06/USIraq_Mar06_rpt.pdf.
Rampton, S., and Stauber, J. (2003). Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.Google Scholar
Read, J. D. (1996). From a passing thought to a false memory in 2 minutes: confusing real and illusory events. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3, 105–111.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Regan, T. (2005). Did the US military use chemical weapons in Iraq? Christian Science Monitor. November 8, 2005. Retrieved October 10, 2007, from www.csmonitor.com/2005/1108/dailyUpdate.html.
Robertson, J. W. (2004). People's watchdogs or government poodles. European Journal of Communication, 19, 457–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roediger, H. L.., and McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 21, 803–814.Google Scholar
Schecter, D. (2003). Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.Google Scholar
Seifert, C. M. (2002). The continued influence of misinformation in memory: what makes a correction effective? In Ross, B. H. (ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory, 41 (pp. 265–292). San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Stanley, D. J., Meyer, J. P., and Topolnytsky, L. (2005). Employee cynicism and resistance to organizational change. Journal of Business and Psychology, 19, 429–459.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stritzke, W. G. K., Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., and Morales, M. (2009). Skepticism and the War on Terror: Development and Initial Validation of a Two-Factor Questionnaire of Skepticism toward Information Disseminated by Government Officials and the Media. Manuscript in preparation.
Tumber, H., and Palmer, J. (2004). Media at War: The Iraq Crisis. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Oostendorp, H., and Bonebakker, C. (1999). Difficulties in updating mental representations during reading news reports. In Oostendorp, H. and Goldman, S. R. (eds.), The Construction of Mental Representations during Reading (pp. 319–339). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Wilkes, A. L., and Reynolds, D. J. (1999). On certain limitations accompanying readers' interpretations of corrections in episodic text. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 52A, 165–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×