Sobering from @davidmcraney.bsky.social @katiejoseff.bsky.social @mschwalbe.bsky.social

Polarisation is eating democracy and truth-seeking because it pays so well politically (mobilisation) and economically (attention monetisation).

podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/y...

1/ Are media literacy courses missing something?

In episode 307 of the "You Are Not So Smart" podcast, @davidmcraney.bsky.social spoke to disinformation researchers Samuel Woolley, @katiejoseff.bsky.social , and @mschwalbe.bsky.social about their study into the news we believe and share. 👇

In case it's helpful, here is another optical illusion example:
www.creativebloq.com/news/mind-be...

One tool she finds helpful for this draws from research on perception to show how our vision can produce errors (e.g., checker shadow illusion), and to critically then connect this fallibility to our introspections as a way to cultivate intellectual humility.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker...

People also need to become aware of the biases—i.e., the fallibility of their thoughts and perceptions—through first-hand experience.

Great questions! Emily Pronin at Princeton has tested interventions to reduce people's "bias blindspot" and finds that teaching about the biases alone is not sufficient.

What if social media is designed to take advantage of our cognitive biases? "When Politics Trumps Truth: Political Concordance Versus Veracity as a Determinant of Believing, Sharing, and Recalling the News"

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Thrilled to share that my close friend Drew Warshaw has officially launched his campaign for New York State Comptroller! 🔥🔥🔥

Drew's bold, innovative ideas will save taxpayers money, strengthen oversight, and tackle New York’s affordability crisis—and he has the grit and experience to get it done.

Go Drew!! So excited for you!!

A recent study by Stanford researchers has uncovered that people are more likely to believe and share news that aligns with their political views, regardless of whether it’s true. This “concordance-over-truth” bias was slightly stronger among supporters of Donald Trump.

Because Trump supporters were less strong in their support for Trump than opposers were in their opposition to Trump, we compared the groups at each level of support—the right hand panel shows the groups both at moderate support.

Hope that helps!

Trump supporters did not exhibit a consistently stronger "concordance-over-truth" bias for believing the news.

In case it's helpful, here is the figure from the paper. The findings are a bit nuanced, but the high-level takeaway is that Trump supporters exhibited greater one-sided news consumption and a stronger "concordance-over-truth" bias for sharing the news.

New episode: Why you are more likely to doubt true news that you would rather not believe than you are to believe fake news you wish was true (no matter your ideology): youarenotsosmart.com/2025/02/20/y...

Thrilled to talk #misinformation and what we can do about it with @davidmcraney.bsky.social on his wildly popular ‘You Are Not So Smart’ podcast. I was joined by co-authors @katiejoseff.bsky.social and Samuel Woolley—check out the episode here!”

youarenotsosmart.com/2025/02/20/y...

A new study reveals that the “illusion of objectivity” is a major factor in believing political misinformation. Partisans who viewed their own political side as unbiased and objective were, ironically, the most biased and least objective when assessing fake news.
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

(7/7) Grateful to my amazing collaborators @katiejoseff.bsky.social, Samuel Woolley, and Geoffrey Cohen!

Read the full paper here: psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

(6/7) The best ways to avoid the bias are to maintain a balanced media diet, increase self-awareness, and, especially, cultivate intellectual humility.

(5/7) One of the top predictors of this bias was the objectivity illusion, or the belief in the objectivity and lack of bias of one’s political side relative to the other.

Those who believed their side was the least biased and most objective were, ironically, the most biased and least objective.

(4/7) The problem won’t be solved alone by dealing with fake news—people also exhibited this bias in disbelieving true news.

In fact, this was the stronger effect: Resistance to inconvenient truth was greater than susceptibility to convenient falsehood.

(3/7) This bias was more pervasive than we expected. We found it even among the highly educated and the deeper analytical reasoners.

Notably, all these effects held for participants’ intentions to share the headlines as well.

(2/7) Attesting to the robustness of this effect, participants were more likely to believe even our most outlandish fake headlines (Level 4) that were aligned with their political views than they were to believe true headlines that were not.

Let’s teach people to question not just the news, but also their minds.

Our paper on #misinformation in JEP:G finds people were more influenced by news’ political alignment than by its truth—a “concordance-over-truth bias” driven more by resistance to truth than susceptibility to falsehood. 🧵1/7