Repeating misinformation creates the illusory truth effect.

Integrity, competence, aligned values, and humility are essential to establish and rebuild trust.

That science is self-correcting should give people confidence that any misinformation will be discovered.

A mug reads: "Please Do Not Confuse Your Google Search With My Medical Degree" on a shelf, a reminder of the illusory truth effect, a psychological bias where people jettison facts to believe information based merely on multiple mentions, even if it's wrong.

The mug belonged to Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, former Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“Trust is critical for a society to be able to work together. But trust seems to be in short supply at the moment,” writes Collins in The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, in which he provides detail about those four pillars of wisdom.1

On Truth, Dr. Collins warns about impulsive dissemination of unverified reports. Aim for objective facts.

With Science, Collins explains the scientific method as he unravels his unique background. His research identified the genetic cause of cystic fibrosis (1989). That base built, it applied to thousands of diseases, at the Human Genome Project and as Collins got invited to the NIH (1993).

“I learned that failure is not an affront to science, it’s an element of science,” Dr. Collins says. New technologies for reading DNA (called sequencing) arose as Dr. Collins worked at the NIH, and by 2003, were well in hand. While science explains the mechanics of our physical world, our belief in a higher power, Collins’ third pillar, targets why we exist.

Faith provides moral grounding and ethics. When deep questions confound us, we can allow non-literal interpretations (of Scripture) to ground us in our spirituality.

That leads to Trust, the last pillar. Nowhere before had Collins seen such trust questioned, but in........

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