I was interviewed by NPR’s Shankar Vedantam for a segment that just aired on Morning Edition:

The story features my research with Jason Reifler on self-affirmation and misperceptions. Here’s the title and abstract of our manuscript (PDF):

Opening the Political Mind?
The effects of self-affirmation and graphical information
on factual misperceptions

People often resist information that contradicts their preexisting beliefs. This
disconfirmation bias is a particular problem in the context of political misperceptions,
which are widespread and frequently difficult to correct. In this paper, we examine two
possible explanations of the prevalence of misinformation. First, people tend to resist
unwelcome information because it is threatening to their worldview or self-concept.
Drawing from social psychology research, we therefore test whether affirming
individuals’ self-worth and thereby buttressing them against this threat can make them
more willing to acknowledge uncomfortable facts. Second, corrective information is
often presented in an ineffective manner. We thus also examine whether graphical
corrections may be more effective than text at reducing counter-arguing by individuals
inclined to resist counter-attitudinal information. Results from three experiments show
that self-affirmation substantially reduces reported misperceptions among those most
likely to hold them, suggesting that people cling to false beliefs in part because giving
them up would threaten their sense of self. Graphical corrections are also found to
successfully reduce incorrect beliefs among potentially resistant subjects and to perform
better than an equivalent textual correction. However, contrary to previous research,
affirmed subjects rarely differ from unaffirmed subjects in their willingness to accept new
counter-attitudinal information

For more information on our research, please see our original article on the difficulty of correcting factual misperceptions, our New America report summarizing the literature on misinformation and fact-checking, and our study of race of researcher effects and the Obama Muslim misperception (all PDFs).