The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is the tendency to trust the media on topics that we are not familiar with, even after we notice that they are inaccurate or misleading on topics that we are familiar with.

It is named after the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who was a friend of the writer Michael Crichton, who coined the term. It shows how we can be easily influenced by the opinions and narratives of the media, even when we know that they are not always reliable or factual.