President Donald Trump, during a meeting in the cabinet room at the White House, Washington, Nov. 22, 2019. AP/Susan Walsh Lee McIntyre, Boston University While watching the House impeachment hearings, I realized my two decades of research into why people ignore, reject or deny science had a political parallel. From […] Read more »
Lies about Migrants and the Rise of the Extreme Right
… Forged in the furnaces of hot cognition and tribal epistemology, hardened opinion dominates cool, fact-based knowledge and provides fertile ground for the spread of falsehoods through social sharing. People in general are biased toward confirmation: they wish to believe that which endorses what they already believe to be true, […] Read more »
Can presidential misinformation on climate change be corrected? Evidence from Internet and phone experiments
Can presidential misinformation affect political knowledge and policy views of the mass public, even when that misinformation is followed by a fact-check? We present results from two experiments, conducted online and over the telephone, in which respondents were presented with Trump misstatements on climate change. While Trump’s misstatements on their […] Read more »
You Are What You Watch? The Social Effects of TV
Other than sleeping and working, Americans are more likely to watch television than engage in any other activity. A wave of new social science research shows that the quality of shows can influence us in important ways, shaping our thinking and political preferences, even affecting our cognitive ability. CONT. Jonathan […] Read more »
Chances are, you’re not as open-minded as you think
Do you think of yourself as open-minded? For a 2017 study, scientists asked 2,400 well-educated adults to consider arguments on politically controversial issues — same-sex marriage, gun control, marijuana legalization — that ran counter to their beliefs. Both liberals and conservatives, they found, were similarly adamant about avoiding contrary opinions. […] Read more »
The psychological phenomenon that blinds Trump supporters to his racism
… Cognitive dissonance, first described by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the late 1950s, occurs when conflict emerges between what people want to believe and the reality that threatens those beliefs. The human mind does not like such inconsistencies: They set off alarms that spur the mind to alter some […] Read more »