What Influences You Could Kill You or Put Could Put Money in Your Pocket
By Kevin Hogan
Why does a picture of a woman's face cause people to react in irrational ways?
What influences people in print?
How do dangerous memes spread?
Why do those memes that are not true persist?
This is a very, very quick overview...which we will expand on in detail at Influence: Boot Camp in March.
The Irrational Human Memes
People are funny creatures.
About 10% of Americans won't get MMR immunizations for their children based on fears that MMR immunizations might be somehow a bad decision for their kids. All the research shows that to fail to immunize your kids for MMR is very, very unwise.
About 10 or 12 years ago, "a study" was published in Lancet that concluded that kids in one area of Europe got autism from MMR immunizations. I read the entire study sometime around 2000 and talked about it in Coffee. It was obviously bogus. Everything from reported data collection to the analysis. It simply was ludicrous. It completely mismatched all prior studies related to autism and it had a myriad of other problems that have no correlation or causation to/from MMR vaccines.
Last month Lancet *finally* published a complete retraction of the study noting that all the data was completely contrived. A bunch of businesses had paid the architect of "the study" to report the data they'd like to see reported.
Of course, in the mean time, a bunch of kids got rubella, the measles and mumps and suffered needlessly because of the influential impact of the report. And a lot more people suffer(ed) because it played on fears people already had of immunizing their kids fir MMR.
Specifically?
Measles hit endemic proportions in England in 2008 where the report was published in Lancet).
And the 12 kids (you probably never read it was only 12 kids in the study, I bet...) in the study that were developmentally disadvantaged? Half of them had developmental problems prior to the beginning of the study and the rest of the kids all had fabricated medical records, not discovered until the parents of the kids were interviewed over the last few years and offered the real medical records.
Today, in general, people don't read studies or even thorough reports on studies, they just read the headlines.
We live in a mentally deficient and "think in byte-sized tidbits" world where people are reading headlines and not the details, the facts. Sadly, this naive but well intended population will continue to grow; and kids (not just their own) will suffer in many respects.
The "study" got a lot of "popular press" and it served as the gospel for many in the face of hundreds of studies that had already shown that what it purported was simply not possible.
What messages were being spread by word of mouth and in the press?
"Don't vaccinate your kids, the shots cause autism."
"Vaccines cause autism"
The very notion of "shooting" your own children is pretty horrifying and that's how the messages came through to about 10% of the population.
That is a powerful meme.
The message was so successfully viral that it spread worldwide. No parent wants to cause their kid to become autistic. That's the kind of "headline" embedded message that spreads like crazy in popular culture. People talk about it. It's gossip worthy. It's the perfect viral message.
This is how a dangerous meme is developed and spread.
But what makes them persist and what does this have to do with a smiling woman?!
What makes dangerous memes so persistent? ... 
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