Getting pwnd

So this weekend I went to Best Buy with my fiancee and we got Rock Band and Guitar Hero III. This started because I played Rock Band at a friend's house and after being successful at it, we decided it would be fun to play ourselves and have our own band.

While we were standing in line there was this middle aged couple that looked to be in their early to mid thirties off to my left checking out. The guy looked at us and his eyes got big and he gushed, "Ohh are you guys getting Rock Band? Can I come over to your house?" While he had a silly grin on his face his wife was rolling her eyes and probably thinking, "Oh my god, do you have to do this everytime we come to this store? You aren't getting it. I don't care how much you want the game. I.don't.care."

He continued, "Oh did you know that you can use the Guitar Hero guitar on Rock Band? Yeah, and they got sued by Activision for using their propertiary stuff but then it got settled because it wasn't being sold with the game, and was only usable with a free downloadable patch."

Then as he was about to go he said, "Man, you guys are so lucky. I know what you're going to be doing all night."

Poor guy has a wife who doesn't appreciate the games. Lockdown!

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I saw this article today. It says that if you disprove a myth that people won't remember it as a false statement later. They will mistakenly remember the information as a truth.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the Center for Disease Control (CDC) flier he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the CDC.

Repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

So instead of saying, "The world is not flat, it's really round" you should not even mention the flat part and only say, "The world is round". It is a wonder more politicians don't know this. They usually use the first type of phrasing rather than the second. It would be great for sales and marketing too. Instead of saying "Brand X is really bad, you should buy Brand Y instead" they should just never talk about Brand X.