Some ideas spread because of properties of the content itself, being easier to remember, infer or retell, independently of who is transmitting them.
Minimally counterintuitive content, threat information, social information about other people and narrative structure all transmit better than matched alternatives in retelling experiments. The bias operates on the idea rather than on the speaker, which is why some claims travel across populations that share no authorities and agree on nothing else.
In practice
- A safety briefing built round one vivid near-miss is repeated in the canteen; the statistics in the same briefing are not.
- A rumour with a villain outruns a correction with a table.
- Standing
- Paired with context bias, which turns on the source rather than the content.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change