David Friedman looks at some Successful Lies, like the study demonstrating that subliminal messages could get movie-goers to buy more snacks:
You see, Vicary lied about the results of his experiment. When he was challenged to repeat the test by the president of the Psychological Corporation, Dr. Henry Link, Vicary’s duplication of his original experiment produced no significant increase in popcorn or Coca-Cola sales. Eventually Vicary confessed that he had falsified the data from his first experiments, and some critics have since expressed doubts that he actually conducted his infamous Ft. Lee experiment at all.
What’s interesting is that the lie worked — and has kept on working:
What struck me as interesting about the account is that Vicary’s fraud worked. I don’t know what its long term effects were on his career, but the long term effect on our culture was to strengthen the idea that human beings are not all that rational, that what appears to be voluntary choice is often really due to fraud or coercion. Vicary’s flashing messages provide a memorable and convincing argument against freedom of choice on the marketplace, and one that I see echoed in many arguments. And the fraud continues to work long after it was exposed.
Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa has had a similar effect:
It was a very popular book, widely used in college courses. Part of its implicit message was that the traditional pattern of sexual behavior in our society was a mistake — an unnecessary and damaging repression of natural impulses, as demonstrated by the happy and sexually liberated youth of Samoa. While the changes in sexual behavior during the course of the 20th century surely had multiple causes, it’s reasonable to view Mead’s book as one of them.Many years later, Derek Freeman, in Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, convincingly argued that Mead’s entire account was bogus. Mead did not know the language when she arrived in Samoa, was not particularly skilled in languages, and it is at least debatable whether she ever became fluent. She did not live with the people she was studying but with an American family in the village. By Freeman’s account, she was heavily dependent on what she was told by a couple of teenaged informants through a translator; he thinks they were deliberately misleading her in the direction of what she wanted to believe, for their own entertainment. And she made no attempt to check the available crime statistics, which would have shown that her peaceful paradise had high rates of murder and rape.