A "perverse downstream consequence for debunking... being corrected by another user for posting false political news increases subsequent sharing of low quality, partisan, and toxic content".Looks like evidence for the backfire effect: "Direct correction ... backfires by making people feel defensive or focusing their attention on so…

the backfire effect can be hard to replicate in rigorous research... a large-scale, peer-reviewed study ... couldn't reproduce the high-profile 2010 study . ... The trouble is that even when we learn that something is false, we may be able to acknowledge those facts without changing our political position accordingly

Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators

Vaccine denial is dangerous... you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there's a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse.

People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired. Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm... Just as confirmation bias shields you when y…

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

This comic was inspired by this three-part series on the backfire effect from the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

for your most cherished beliefs about things like climate change or vaccines or Republicans, instead of changing your mind in the face of challenging evidence or compelling counterarguments, you resist... your challenged beliefs then grow stronger.

"conservatives who received a correction telling them that Iraq did not have [Weapons of Mass Destruction] were more likely to believe that Iraq had WMD." ... fact-checking reinforced the mistaken belief... the "backfire effect."A new paper, however, suggests the "backfire effect" may be a very rare phenomenon.... People are extra happy to adopt a…

Anxious about... propaganda and fake news ... progressives are calling for an increased commitment to media literacy ... Others ... focus on expert fact-checking and labeling.  ... fail to take into consideration the cultural context ... Understanding what sources to trust is a basic tenet of media literacy education... underlying assumption ... N…

When someone tries to correct you... it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions ... the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper... exerting effort dealing with the cognitive dissonance produced by conflicting evidence, we actually end up buildin…