Finding Common Ground/Powerful False Narratives

Very often, the best story wins. Here are examples of powerful and influential false, misleading, or unsubstantiated narratives. As you investigate these narratives, keep these questions in mind: 1) Identify the narrative elements that make this compelling, convincing, memorable, and likely to be shared with others. 2) Identify the falsehoods in the narrative. 3) Identify the various calls to action inspired by the narrative. 4) How is this narrative harmful, if at all? 5) Who gains, and who loses as this narrative spreads?

Political Narratives

• Trickle-down economics.
• Welfare queens
• Narratives popularized by Ayn Rand
• Communist Manifesto
• The daisy advertisement
• Tonkin Gulf Resolution
• A rising tide lifts all boats.
• Allegations of widespread voter fraud.
• Federal debt is like household debt
• Money equals well-being
• GDP is a good indicator of well-being.
• The Stock market is the economy.
• Land can be owned.
• Corporations are people.

Healthcare Narratives

• If you don’t eat fat you won’t get fat.
• Nutritional cholesterol causes serum cholesterol
• Vaccines cause autism.
• Homeopathy is effective.
• Other popular yet ineffective treatments.

Psychological Therapies.

• Many practices claimed to be effective psychological therapies are ineffective.

Merchants of doubt

Merchants of Doubt is the name of a book and documentary film that describe several practices the tobacco industry uses to discredit evidence-based research that tobacco is harmful to health. Similar tactics are also used to discredit or minimize several other dangers, listed here.

• Tobacco health hazards
• Global warming
• Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
• Duck and cover

Character Traits

• Kindness is weakness
• Apologizing is a sign of weakness
• Toil is virtue.
• Leisure is laziness.
• Leisure is earned.
• The world does not owe you a living.
• The world owes me a living.
• The Noble Savage
• Appeal to nature
• Blank Slate
• A woman’s place is in the home

Charismatics, Hero, and Tyranny stories

• Remember the Alamo
• Davy Crocket

Vilifying others

• Obama citizenship conspiracy theories
• Hillary Clinton, lock her up, Pizzagate conspiracy theory
• Swiftboating
• McCarthyism
• Men are pigs

Religious Stories

• Theist narratives
• Afterlife
• Book of Genesis
• David and Goliath
• Jonah and the Whale
• Book of Job
• Noah’s Arc and the Flood
• Satan
• Creationism
• Evolution is just a theory
• Nativity of Jesus
• Easter Story, The resurrection of Jesus
• Exorcism
• The United States is a Christian Nation
• Atheists are amoral.

Happy History

• Columbus discovered America
• The American dream
• American Exceptionalism
• Blacks were better off as slaves
• Holocaust denial
• Using the phrase ethnic cleansing as a euphuism for genocide.
• Big lies
• Many examples of historical negationism

Paranormal

• Alien Abductions
• Procter and Gamble Logo Myth
• Day-care sex-abuse hysteria
• The law of attraction
• This list of topics characterized as pseudoscience.

And so many more…

• A list of common misconceptions.
• A list of urban legends
• Hoaxes
• Fake News
• Propaganda
• Superstitions
• Old Wives Tales
• Spin
• The Skeptic’s Dictionary.