Since Election Day, numerous false allegations of fraud have been published on social media and repeated elsewhere, most of which have been easily debunked, yet a large swath of the population still appears to believe them. According to a recent poll roughly three-quarters (77%) of Trump backers say former Vice […] Read more »
Coronavirus, ‘Plandemic’ and the seven traits of conspiratorial thinking
No matter the details of the plot, conspiracy theories follow common patterns of thought. Ranta Images/iStock/Getty Images Plus John Cook, George Mason University; Sander van der Linden, University of Cambridge; Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol, and Ullrich Ecker, University of Western Australia The conspiracy theory video “Plandemic” recently went viral. […] Read more »
Fake Claims of Fake News: Political Misinformation, Warnings, and the Tainted Truth Effect
… Our research contributes to the relatively understudied topic of the tainted truth effect. We extend social cognition research on the tainted truth effect to a political setting, where post-event misinformation and information is presented in the form of political news. We first ask, after viewing a political event, how […] Read more »
The Conspiracy Theory Handbook
Conspiracy theories are not harmless fun—they can do much harm to society because they undermine trust in the institutions that matter the most in an emergency, such as public health agencies and local governments. In an emergency—like the current COVID pandemic—what matters is the truth. To combat an acute crisis […] Read more »
She’s the Next President. Wait, Did You Read That Right?
… Her. It’s a three-letter pronoun that, despite the seemingly endless debate over whether a woman can become president, feels relatively benign. But what if its use, or an unconscious aversion to its use, had some small power to influence voter perception? Could something as simple as a pronoun reflect, […] Read more »
The Polarization of Reality
Evidence is growing that Americans are polarized not only in their views on policy issues and attitudes towards government and society, but also in their perceptions of the same, factual reality. In this paper we conceptualize how to think about the polarization of reality and review recent papers that show […] Read more »