Top Tweets for #noSpin

The most dangerous communicator isn't necessarily the liar. Actually, it may be the person who doesn't care whether they're telling the truth. New research from Wake Forest University, recently published in "Current Psychology," confirms this contention. Participants in their study rated identical false statements as more believable when told the source was indifferent to truth than when told the source was a known liar. Repetition did the rest: hear a truth-indifferent claim more than once, and it starts to feel true. The finding that should stop any communicator cold: when people learned (after the fact) that a source had lied to them, they went back and discounted what they'd heard. The lie stopped working. But when they learned the source simply didn't care about truth, belief held firm. The repeated claims kept feeling true. Against such "bullshit," only one thing worked: a warning delivered before people ever heard the claims. Once bullshit was in their heads, no correction removed it. Four implications for anyone whose words carry public weight: 1. The liar triggers suspicion because audiences recognize the intent to deceive. The bullshitter slips past those defenses because careless, confident talk doesn't register as deception (which is precisely why it does more lasting damage). 2. "Staying on message" deserves harder scrutiny than it gets. Repetition is legitimate communications discipline, when the message is true. Repeating claims without caring whether they're accurate isn't discipline. It's the exploitation of a documented cognitive vulnerability, and this study shows exactly how well it works. 3. And this is what makes the crisis-comms implication legitimate rather than rhetorical: rebuttal genuinely works against a lie that's been exposed. But it definitely doesn't work against glib certainty. 4. We sort false claims into disinformation (deliberate) and misinformation (mistaken). The bullshitter fits neither box: not lying, not mistaken — just indifferent. This may be why comms countermeasures, built for the other two, don't touch the bullshitter. The strategic question in any response isn't "How do we correct this?" Instead, it's "Is this a lie or is this bullshit?" because the answer determines whether correction in the public mind is even a viable PR play. If it's bullshit, inoculation is the main move. Anticipation and planning therefore become critical. The lesson for leaders: credibility is not just avoiding lies. It's establishing the facts before speaking, every time, until audiences learn that when you talk, you've already checked and can therefore be trusted as an accurate communicator.