"As someone who recently completed 15 years of training to become an infectious diseases physician-scientist, I can’t avoid these conversations."

Port Washington's $8 billion AI data center project saw its strongest showing of opposition from area residents on Oct. 7. But it may be too late.

New research shows that cultivating open-minded thinking can be taught, and that this simple shift improves our ability to tell facts from falsehoods.

Our research reveals that a tendency to feel personally wronged makes people more vulnerable to conspiracy beliefs.

This research examines how negative emotions affect the degree to which people endorse conspiracy theories. Conspiracy beliefs typically flourish in contemporary politics that evoke negative emotions. In the present article, we hypothesized that citizens in ressentiment, a particular emotional state salient in contemporary grievance politics, is a key underpinning of why people believe in conspiracy theories. Ressentiment is a multi-layered emotion, within which perceptions of unfairness, bitterness, and feelings of (suppressed) anger are central. Across three studies, we examined the role of ressentiment in predicting belief in conspiracy theories. Study 1 (United Kingdom, N = 300) and Study 2 (United States, N = 300) revealed a positive relationship between ressentiment, measured through a validated scale, and belief in conspiracy theories. This relationship was mediated by rejection of the status quo. In Study 3 (United States, N = 300, pre-registered), we used a vignette describing a fictitious country to experimentally show that evoking ressentiment (vs. control condition) significantly increased belief in conspiracy theories. Taken together, these findings reveal that ressentiment is central for understanding the emotional roots of believing in conspiracy theories.

A new working paper looks at the durability of Community Notes

Podcast Episode · Why Should I Trust You? · 10/09/2025 · 1h 15m

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npj Complexity - The complexity of misinformation extends beyond virus and warfare analogies

Critical thinking is widely accepted as a goal of higher education. However, students are graduating from college with a multitude of false beliefs indicating current strategies are inadequate. We ...