… Much has been written about “post-truth” politics in the context of the recent presidential election, and rightly so, as Trump’s relationship with the truth is not the same old conservative legerdemain. But in an important sense, anti-fact campaigns, such as the effort led by archconservatives like the Koch brothers to […] Read more »
This Article Won’t Change Your Mind: The facts on why facts alone can’t fight false beliefs
… You can just switch off the radio, change channels, only like the Facebook pages that give you the kind of news you prefer. You can construct a pillow fort of the information that’s comfortable. Most people aren’t totally ensconced in a cushiony cave, though. They build windows in the […] Read more »
Why We Believe Obvious Untruths
How can so many people believe things that are demonstrably false? … The truth is obvious if you bother to look for it, right? This line of thinking leads to explanations of the hoodwinked masses that amount to little more than name calling: “Those people are foolish” or “Those people […] Read more »
Motivated Responding in Studies of Factual Learning
… In our article in Political Behavior, we reexamine the evidence for motivated learning. In a series of experiments, we presented people with tabular data from a putative study on a social policy, either gun control or raising the minimum wage. Following Kahan et al., we manipulated the congeniality of […] Read more »
Why facts don’t change our minds
… As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did […] Read more »
The Normalization Trap
What’s normal? Perhaps the answer seems obvious: What’s normal is what’s typical — what is average. But in a recent paper in the journal Cognition, we argue that the situation is more complicated than that. … Our research suggests, for example, that as President Trump continues to do things that […] Read more »