Murray refuses to fall prey to the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect https://t.co/aSqhPd32bx
— Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸 (@aaron_renn) March 2, 2025
Michael Crichton described “Gelman Amnesia” as a cognitive bias where a person notices how the media misrepresents or misunderstands a topic they are knowledgeable about, but then still trusts the same media on subjects they are less familiar with.  He explained it like this:
You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray Gell-Mann’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story—and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
The term “Gelman Amnesia” comes from physicist Murray Gell-Mann, though he didn’t coin the phrase himself. The idea is that people repeatedly forget how unreliable media can be, despite direct evidence of its inaccuracy in areas they understand.
In short: We recognize media incompetence in our own field but assume it’s competent elsewhere, even though the same flaws likely apply across the board.
Despite its recognition in popular discussions, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect has not been extensively studied or formalized within scholarly literature. A search for academic papers specifically addressing this effect yields limited results, indicating a gap in empirical research on the topic. However, related concepts such as media accuracy, cognitive biases, and public trust in journalism have been explored in academic contexts. For instance, Erwin Knoll’s law of media accuracy suggests that “everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.”
While direct scholarly examinations of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect are scarce, understanding its implications can be informed by studies on media literacy and critical thinking. These fields investigate how individuals assess the credibility of information sources and the psychological mechanisms underlying trust in media, which are pertinent to the effect described by Crichton.
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