The terms “post-truth” and “fake news” have become increasingly prevalent in public discourse over the last year. This article explores the growing abundance of misinformation, how it influences people, and how to counter it. We examine the ways in which misinformation can have an adverse impact on society. We summarize […] Read more »
Trump is a real-world political science experiment
President Donald Trump is a Republican. But often, and more so than any president in memory, he lacks a consistent political ideology. … “We’ve never had a federal elected official, let alone the leader of a party or the president of the United States, who is so easily moved from […] Read more »
How Norms Change
… Understanding the psychology of changing norms starts from a simple insight: although we may wish to be perfectly rational and impartial, bias is an inescapable part of what it means to be human. … The question, therefore, isn’t “Do biases exist?” but, rather, “How much do we let them […] Read more »
The Trump Voter Paradox
Roy Moore’s decisive victory over Luther Strange in the Republican Senate primary runoff on Tuesday in Alabama confirms — as I have reported before — that many Republican voters have a strong sense of white identity, that they harbor high levels of racial resentment and that they sometimes exhibit authoritarian […] Read more »
Why the wiring of our brains makes it hard to stop climate change
… Humans aren’t well wired to act on complex statistical risks. We care a lot more about the tangible present than the distant future. Many of us do that to the extreme — what behavioral scientists call hyperbolic discounting — which makes it particularly hard to grapple with something like […] Read more »
Who Falls for Fake News? The Roles of Analytic Thinking, Motivated Reasoning, Political Ideology, and Bullshit Receptivity
Inaccurate beliefs pose a threat to democracy and fake news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate beliefs have been propagated via social media. Here we investigate the cognitive psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. CONT. Gordon Pennycook & David G. Rand, Yale […] Read more »