Jason Reifler and I released a New America Foundation report today titled "Which Corrections Work? Research results and practice recommendations." Here's the executive summary:
Social science research has found that misinformation about politics and other controversial issues is often very difficult to correct. However, all corrections are not necessarily equal— some approaches to presenting corrective information may be more persuasive than others. In this report, we summarize new research in the field and present recommendations for journalists, educators, and civil society groups who hope to counter the influence of false or misleading claims.
The key challenge in countering misperceptions is to understand the psychology of belief— why people might believe something that is not true and reject or ignore corrective information contradicting that belief. If people are sufficiently motivated to believe in a claim, of course, it may be impossible to change their minds. In other cases, however, different approaches to presenting corrective information may be more effective. This report focuses on three areas in which corrections often fail to capitalize on what is known about how people process information: using non-credible or unpersuasive sources, failing to displace inaccurate causal understandings of an event or outcome; and trying to negate false claims rather than affirm correct ones.
I summarized our findings for Columbia Journalism Review as well. Here's the introduction to my column on our findings:
Misperceptions, like zombies, are difficult to kill. A recent Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, for instance, found that the “death panel” myth is still believed by a substantial portion of the American public more than four years after the term was first coined by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.
What can journalists do? There is reason for concern that artificially balanced coverage may misinform the public about the state of the available evidence, but trying to set the record straight isn’t always effective either. In fact, research I have conducted with the University of Exeter’s Jason Reifler and Duke University’s Peter Ubel concludes that corrective information about controversial issues like “death panels” is often unpersuasive to the most susceptible ideological group and sometimes makes the problem worse—a phenomenon known as the backfire effect. This research inspired us to start to develop a set of best practices for journalists. In a New America Foundation report published last year, Reifler and I presented a series of recommendations based on social science research to help journalists counter misinformation more effectively.
In a follow-up New America Foundation report published today, Reifler and I summarize the results of a series of experiments conducted in late 2012 and early 2013 that put several of our previous recommendations to the test.