PsychologicalDUAL-USE

Bizarreness Effect

What it is

Strange, schema-violating material is remembered better than ordinary material when the two are mixed, so the most bizarre element of a message is what survives — whether or not it was the point, and whether or not it was true.

How it works

McDaniel and Einstein showed in 1986 that sentences with bizarre imagery (“the dog rode the bicycle down the street”) were recalled better than common ones — but only when bizarre and common sentences were mixed in the same list. In a list made entirely of bizarre items the advantage vanished, which told them the effect was about distinctiveness rather than strangeness itself, a conclusion McDaniel, Einstein and colleagues confirmed in 1995 and later reviews by Worthen and Hunt uphold. Bizarre items also benefit free recall more than cued recall, and the advantage grows with delay. The mechanism is that the memory system indexes what departs from expectation; an event that violates the schema of its surroundings is encoded with more attention and retrieved more easily because it competes with fewer neighbours. The persuasion consequence is that the strangest element of a message will be what survives, whether or not it was the point. Advertisers use this deliberately, and so do political operators and provocateurs: a bizarre claim or stunt is remembered after the surrounding argument, and after the correction, because corrections are ordinary and the claim was not.

Real-world examples

  • •In McDaniel and Einstein's mixed lists, bizarre sentences were recalled better than common ones; in pure lists of bizarre sentences the advantage disappeared.
  • •Metro Trains Melbourne's 2012 “Dumb Ways to Die” campaign delivered a safety message through absurd cartoon deaths; it became one of the most shared public-service campaigns ever made, and the message travelled with the absurdity.
  • •Cadbury's 2007 drumming gorilla and Old Spice's 2010 “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” are remembered years later by people who cannot recall any conventional advertisement from the same year.
  • •Political stunts — Boris Johnson stuck on a zip wire in 2012, Howard Dean's scream in 2004 — are recalled long after the policy speeches of the same week; the effect is indifferent to whether the memory helps its subject.
  • •Outlandish claims circulated in political and health misinformation are recalled more reliably than the dull corrections that follow them, which is one reason the continued influence effect is so hard to defeat.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Using a strange image to make a true and important message memorable is craft; attaching bizarreness to a false or unrepresentative claim because the claim will outlast its dull correction, or staging absurdity to displace substance from attention, is manipulation.

  • ●Use bizarreness to make a true and important message memorable, and make sure the strange element carries the message rather than replacing it.
  • ●Do not attach a bizarre image to a false or unrepresentative claim because you know the claim will outlast its correction.
  • ●When the memorable stunt is unrelated to the substance, say so; a campaign remembered for its gorilla owes the audience an honest product.

How to defend against it

  • ►When you remember the strange thing and nothing else, treat the memory as an artefact and go back to the source for what was actually claimed or offered.
  • ►Ask whether the bizarre element is the argument or a vehicle; if removing it leaves no claim, there was no claim.
  • ►For outrageous claims that stick, look up the correction deliberately, since the correction will not stick on its own; write the true version next to the memorable one.
  • ►Notice that provocateurs can plan for this: an absurd statement that dominates a news cycle was often chosen because it would, so ask what it displaced.

References

  1. McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (1986). Bizarre imagery as an effective memory aid: The importance of distinctiveness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12(1), 54-65
    The founding finding: bizarre sentences recalled better only in mixed lists, implicating distinctiveness.
  2. McDaniel, M. A., Einstein, G. O., DeLosh, E. L., May, C. P., & Brady, P. (1995). The bizarreness effect: It's not surprising, it's complex. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(2), 422-435
    Boundary conditions of the effect, including list composition and retrieval type.
  3. Worthen, J. B., & Hunt, R. R. (2011). Mnemonology: Mnemonics for the 21st Century. Psychology Press
    Review of distinctiveness-based memory effects including bizarreness.
Last reviewed
Suggest a correction

Detect Bizarreness Effect in any text

Paste any message, email, or article into our free Manipulation Detector to see if Bizarreness Effect or other techniques are being used on you.

Try the Detector FreeCreate Free Account