Facts and Myths about Misperceptions

By Brendan Nyhan. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2020

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Misperceptions threaten to warp mass opinion and public policy on controversial issues in politics, science, and health. What explains the prevalence and persistence of these false and unsupported beliefs, which seem to be genuinely held by many people? Though limits on cognitive resources and attention play an important role, many of the most destructive misperceptions arise in domains where individuals have weak incentives to hold accurate beliefs and strong directional motivations to endorse beliefs that are consistent with a group identity such as partisanship. These tendencies are often exploited by elites who frequently create and amplify misperceptions to influence elections and public policy. Though evidence is lacking for claims of a “post-truth” era, changes in the speed with which false information travels and the extent to which it can find receptive audiences require new approaches to counter misinformation. Reducing the propagation and influence of false claims will require further efforts to inoculate people in advance of exposure (for example, media literacy), debunk false claims that are already salient or widespread (for example, fact-checking), reduce the prevalence of low-quality information (for example, changing social media algorithms), and discourage elites from promoting false information (for example, strengthening reputational sanctions).

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a4642d6a6e30607ae8de7a5e180c7b0e48fcd5a

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In Communication

1. Ingar K. Haaland
2. Johannes Wohlfart
3. Christopher Roth
4. David Y. Yang
5. Leonardo Bursztyn

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Johannes Wohlfart
2. Christopher Roth
3. Ingar K. Haaland
4. David Y. Yang
5. Leonardo Bursztyn

Citations in the corpus

• Misperceptions About Others (2021, methodology): “This requires studies to elicit both in-group and out-group perceptions, and the analyses in this section are thus limited to the following papers: Ahler and Sood (2018); Ahler (2014); Cullen and Perez-Truglia (2018); Mildenberger and Tingley (2019); Levendusky and Malhotra (2016); Bordalo et al.”
• Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, background): “However, while the evidence on the effectiveness of correction of misperceptions in the political domain is mixed, such “backfiring” effects seem to be the exception (Guess et al., 2020; Nyhan, 2020, 2021). comparable across settings are “behavioral elasticities.””