Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Just something to keep an eye out for...
potential for "social engineering"In a study accepted for publication in the journal Social Cognition, the researchers describe how they fooled college students into thinking that as children they had become sick when eating certain foods. The students answered questions about their early eating memories. A week later, they were presented with a bogus food history profile that embedded a single falsehood - that they had gotten sick when eating pickles or hard-boiled eggs - among real memories. "This is called the false feedback technique, where you gather data from the subjects and use it to lend credibility to this false profile," said Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine who led the research. But about 40 percent of the 336 participants confirmed in later interviews that they remembered getting sick or believed it to be true. Compared with a control group, the believers said on questionnaires that they would be much more likely to avoid eating pickles or hard-boiled eggs if offered them at a party. In another study, just completed, the researchers found that people who were told that they loved asparagus as children were much more drawn to that slender delicacy than those whose memories were left alone
Like Mama said -- always read the fine print. [It's made from peeeeeople!]
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