… To understand why Trump’s Carrier stunt succeeded, it’s worth turning to a 1964 political science classic, Murray Edelman’s The Symbolic Uses of Politics. The takeaway lesson is that in politics, clear symbolic actions are often more important than results (which are often ambiguous or unclear). As long as Trump […] Read more »
Why do we fall for fake news?
S. Shyam Sundar, Pennsylvania State University In recent weeks, the amount of online fake news that circulated during the final months of the presidential race is coming to light, a disturbing revelation that threatens to undermine the country’s democratic process. We’re already seeing some real-world consequences. After fake news stories […] Read more »
The Roots of Implicit Bias
… As new research from our laboratory suggests, implicit bias is grounded in a basic human tendency to divide the social world into groups. In other words, what may appear as an example of tacit racism may actually be a manifestation of a broader propensity to think in terms of […] Read more »
Overcoming ‘End-Point Bias’: Liberals, Fox News and Arctic Sea Ice Trends
“End-point bias” is a well-known psychological tendency to interpret a recent short-term fluctuation as a reversal of a long-term trend. When scientists reported a significant increase in the extent of Arctic sea ice in 2013, a FoxNews.com story evoked end-point bias by contrasting the historically low previous year with the […] Read more »
Donald Trump has every reason to keep white people thinking about race
There’s a growing body of research in political science and political psychology suggesting that even very mild messages or cues that touch on race can alter political opinions. The landmark book on the subject is Princeton professor Tali Mendelberg’s 2001 book The Race Card, which marshaled a wide array of […] Read more »
The Price of Certainty
It’s alarming to see how polarized politics have become in the United States. The wider the gulf grows, the more people seem to be certain that the other side is wrong. Certainty can be a dangerous thing. Two years ago, I met the social psychologist Arie Kruglanski while researching a […] Read more »