Jason Reifler
Professor of Political Science at University of Southampton
Oct 17, 2024
11:00 am
Oct 17, 2024
11:00 am
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
London E1W 1LP, UK
Talk recording
Why are high-profile misperceptions so persistent? Accurate information is widely available online and yet false and unsupported claims about issues like climate change and health care endure for years. This disjunction, we argue, is caused by ``correction mismatch'' --- people's lack of exposure to relevant correction information, which has been demonstrated to reduce misperceptions in past experiments. We examine this phenomenon in the context of false claims of widespread voter fraud with U.S. data from 2020--2022. Results using nationally representative experimental and observational data indicate that exposure to corrective information reduces fraud misperceptions. Turning to online behavior data we examine exposure to fraud claims at the article level and try to estimate to how often people encountered corrective information from fact-checkers or in mainstream news, especially among people who are predisposed to believe in these claims. The persistence of misperceptions, in other words, may be driven more by the information that people encounter than by their response when they encounter it.
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