Gell-Mann amnesia effect

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is the tendency to distrust a news outlet’s reporting after finding errors in a familiar subject, then trust its coverage of unfamiliar subjects.

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Illusory truth effect: The tendency for repeated claims to seem more true, regardless of their actual accuracy. Familiarity with an outlet can make its repeated claims feel credible even after errors undermine trust.
Michael Crichton: An American physician, author, and filmmaker known for science fiction novels including Jurassic Park. Crichton coined the name while describing his reactions to inaccurate reporting outside his expertise.
Media literacy: The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in varied forms. It helps distinguish checking a report’s evidence from trusting an outlet by reputation alone.
Epistemic trust: Trust in people or institutions as sources of knowledge. The effect illustrates how trust can persist despite direct evidence of a source’s fallibility.
Source monitoring: The process of remembering where, when, and how information was learned. Forgetting which outlet produced unreliable reporting can help explain the effect’s reset in trust.
Murray Gell-Mann: An American theoretical physicist who developed the quark model and received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics. Crichton used Gell-Mann’s name for the effect after recounting a conversation with him.
Science journalism: Journalism that reports on scientific research, institutions, and their effects on society. Technical claims can be hard to verify without the subject knowledge that exposes mistakes.
Epistemic vigilance: The capacity to assess whether communicated information and its source are reliable. Vigilance describes the scrutiny that the effect’s return to unearned trust can bypass.
Confirmation bias: The tendency to favor information that supports existing beliefs and discount information that challenges them. Prior expectations can shape which errors seem disqualifying and which reports still seem plausible.
Jurassic Park: A 1990 science-fiction novel by Michael Crichton about a theme park populated by cloned dinosaurs. Crichton’s best-known novel helps identify the author who later named the effect.