by Bud Bromley, with help from Grok

A while back I asked Grok about a weird story I half-remembered: something about a Secret Service agent trying to poison President Trump with ricin on his steak. It turned out to be completely made up — one of those fabricated articles from a site called Real Raw News that specializes in over-the-top “news” that reads like satire but gets passed around as fact.

The story never happened. No charges, no arrests, no hazmat teams at the restaurant. Yet years later, when I saw a headline about a real assassination attempt, that fake ricin tale popped right back into my mind. I had seen it in passing — maybe an airport screen, a social-media scroll — never got to the fine print or the disclaimer. It just lodged there.

That got us talking about a bigger puzzle: Why do false stories so often win the race? Legally, in the U.S., this kind of thing is protected speech. The Supreme Court has ruled that even deliberately false stories about public figures are okay unless they cause real, provable harm and the publisher knew they were lying in a reckless way. Real Raw News even added a “humor, parody, and satire” disclaimer years ago to stay on the safe side of the First Amendment. No lawsuits followed the ricin piece, just like dozens of others they’ve published.

Morally and socially, though, it feels different. A lie (or a truth that’s stretched) gets planted fast and emotionally. It persuades people before anyone has time to check it. The correction usually comes later, buried on page 12 or in a quiet online note long after the original headline has faded. Most of us don’t have the time or energy to chase every retraction. So the false version wins by default. It becomes part of how we remember the world, even when we know we should be skeptical.

This isn’t new — Vance Packard wrote about hidden persuasion in advertising back in the 1950s — but the internet makes it worse. The first vivid image sticks; the boring correction doesn’t.

Then Grok brought up an old psychology experiment that suddenly felt relevant and reminded of lectures by Dr. Jean Hendricks at my alma mater Mercer University in the 1960s. In the early 1960s, researcher John B. Calhoun built “rat utopias” — big pens with unlimited food, water, and safety. At first the rats thrived. Then the population exploded. Instead of spreading out evenly, most of them crowded into one corner (what Calhoun called a “behavioral sink”). They formed little groups, established pecking orders, and started fighting for dominance. Normal social behavior broke down. Some rats withdrew completely; others became hyper-aggressive. The “tribes” weren’t based on ideas or persuasion — they formed because of raw power, status, crowding, and the simple fact that there was nowhere else to go.

Calhoun himself saw parallels to human cities and social stress. Once density crossed a certain point, normal bonds frayed and pathological groupings took over.

That hit me. In our human world of headlines, social feeds, and identity politics, the “behavioral sink” feels familiar. We don’t choose our tribes through calm debate. A lot of it is social coercion, status signaling, and the pressure of the crowded information environment. The first story (true or fake) that gives you a sense of belonging or an enemy to fight against can pull you in. Corrections feel like they come from “outside the pen.”

The fix isn’t banning speech — that creates bigger problems. It’s cultivating better habits: default skepticism, checking primary sources when something feels emotionally charged, and remembering that our memories are sticky but imperfect.

False information wins a lot of the time because it’s easier. But that doesn’t mean we have to let it. A little curiosity and a willingness to say “I might be wrong” goes a long way — even for us mere mortals.

For further reading (primary sources only)

• Calhoun, John B. “Population Density and Social Pathology.” Scientific American, February 1962. Full article PDF available here: https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/1962-calhoun.pdf
• Calhoun, John B. “A ‘Behavioral Sink’.” In Roots of Behavior, edited by E.L. Bliss, 1962. (Reprinted PDF: https://johnbcalhoun.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1962-a-behavoral-sink-secure.pdf)
• New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) – the landmark free-speech case on public figures and false statements.
• Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988) – protecting even outrageous parody/satire.