What makes people susceptible to fake news and other forms of strategic misinformation? And what, if anything, can be done about it? These questions have become more urgent in recent years, not least because of revelations about the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 United States presidential election by disseminating […] Read more »
How We View Our Reality Shapes Our Politics. But Facts Still Matter.
… The claim that perception is reality has long been a maxim in politics. That’s particularly true as it relates to the economy. And with the 2020 presidential election ramping up, how Americans feel about their financial well-being, and the country’s, has come to the foreground again. But is perception […] Read more »
Are Smart People Ruining Democracy?
Is political polarization over the reality of climate change, the efficacy of gun control, the safety of nuclear power, and other policy-relevant facts attributable to a simple deficit in public science literacy? Dan Kahan reviews study results showing that polarization on complex factual issues rises in lockstep with culturally diverse […] Read more »
Fundamentalists Are More Likely to Fall for Fake News
Precisely two years after the election of President Donald Trump—a contest stained by deliberately inaccurate information that was shared and weaponized on social media—America has not yet come to grips with the issue of fake news. How it spreads is a central issue, but an even more basic question is […] Read more »
The junk science Republicans used to undermine Ford and help save Kavanaugh
The politically convenient, scientifically baseless theory that sexual assault so traumatized Christine Blasey Ford she mixed up her attacker is now something like common wisdom for many Republicans. President Trump explicitly endorsed the theory Saturday, shortly after Brett M. Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed as a Supreme Court judge, telling reporters […] Read more »
The Least Analytical 2016 Voters: Democrats Who Supported Trump
… A study that examined voters’ styles of thinking finds that, as expected, Democrats are somewhat more analytically oriented than Republicans. This supports the idea that conservatism is something of a default setting, and rejecting it requires intellectual reasoning. However, the biggest difference in cognitive approaches was between two subsets […] Read more »