A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Borrowing a chapter from the Nazis, they believe that the more often a lie is repeated, the more people are prone to accept it as truth. Nothing is too scandalous for them, and I am constantly amazed at the fact that at one time I was a close associate of people capable of such deceitful behavior.

The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why, people will believe it. Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they’ll believe it and go along with you.

The situation is very simple. Familiarity leads to availability and often to accuracy as well; hence availability is used as a cue to accuracy.
The problem is that mere assertion and repetition also leads to availability, whether or not this assertion and repetition involve reality, as familiarity generally does. Thus, the “big lie” of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was based on the idea that if something is repeated often enough, people will believe it—in large part simply because they have heard it before…
Goebbels apparently believed that providing a credible source, for him the German national government, was a critical component in having the repeated statements believed. Subsequent research has shown that the credibility of a source is not a necessary condition to develop beliefs…
Worse yet, mere repetition—which creates an availability bias due to familiarity, can also make people confident of their own decision making in the absence of any feedback that they have made good decisions.

If a man repeats a lie over and over, he will eventually accept the lie as truth. Moreover, he will believe it to be the truth.

After pausing, the student continues: “There’s also an element of believing something because you want it to happen.” This betrays a second bias in which we believe what we want to be true. This is a form of confirmation bias, which exacerbates the distorting effect of availability bias. We seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs or desires, and ignore information that refutes them.

It's the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And ones that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. Once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen. — MUHAMMAD ALI You

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

I've noticed that. They believe the lies far more than they believe the truth.

People will believe what they want most to believe, what they yearn to be true. Nothing is more readily accepted than the seeming confirmation of an already established prejudice.