DON'T BOTHER ME WITH THE TRUTH; I HAVE AN IDEOLOGY:

Mark Lambert addresses Launcelot's apparent transformation from being Arthur's best knight to being a murderous and unrepentant liar by arguing that "Lancelot is acting within a shame system rather than a guilt system," in which the crucial distinction is not whether Launcelot is objectively guilty (in the modern sense), but whether he can be shamed by someone proving the charge through the means available for resolving disputes in the Arthurian court: trial by combat. Lambert writes that:

What matters for Lancelot here is not the fact of his guilt or innocence of the adultery and his personal awareness of that fact, but the public recognition of the charge, the public machinery for making the charge good, and the way the public accusation and public "making good" affect his reputation and the queen's. [. . .] The important thing is not one's own knowledge of what one has done (the inner life is not very significant in Malory), but public recognition of one's actions.

This passage seems disturbingly prophetic when read alongside today's social and news media, and it foregrounds the essential point that Launcelot's understanding of reality is not confined solely to the literary world of the Morte. Lambert himself writes that, "It is Malory himself, not just his characters, for whom honor and shame are more real than innocence and guilt." But Lambert's observation is not only true of the fifteenth-century Malory: it is also true of twenty-first-century people, many of whom seem now to live within a shame system rather than a guilt system.

The classic experiments to correct misinformation date to the late 1980s. Subjects were given news briefs from the scene of a fictional warehouse fire, one of which mentions a closet with volatile materials - cans of oil paint and gas cylinders - others report 'thick, oily smoke', 'sheets of flames' and 'toxic fumes' that put the firefighters' lives at risk. A further brief cites the police investigator on the case stating that the closet was, in fact, empty, before the report ends with the fire finally put out.

Having read the briefs, subjects had to answer a series of questions meant to probe their grasp of the correction made by the police investigator. It seems a simple test yet, across a multitude of studies, people repeatedly fail it. In one experiment, as many as 90 per cent of the subjects linked the fire's toxic nature or intensity to the cans of oil paint and gas cylinders, despite none being found in the closet. More surprisingly, when asked directly, most of these participants readily acknowledged the empty closet. Researchers have reported similar results many times, including using blatantly direct retractions ('there were no cans of paint or gas cylinders'). Yet no matter how clear the correction, typically more than half of subjects' references to the original misinformation persist. What's remarkable is that people appear to cling to the falsehood while knowing it to be false. This suggests that, even if successfully debunked, myths can still creep into our judgments and colour our decisions - an outcome referred to in the literature as 'the continued influence effect'.

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