Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Misinformation promoting scientific misconceptions can spread rapidly in ways it once couldn’t, and discussions of thistrend now appear to shape nearly all discourse about polarizing topics (e.g., politics, science denial). What effects mightthis recent trend have on peoples intuitive theories of how others learn and assimilate new evidence? Furthermore, howdo these theories shape engagement in discussion of polarizing issues? To shed light on these questions, we conducteda series of exploratory studies (Experiments = 4; N = 1176) which demonstrate two key results. First, people do notthink that misinformation is more likely to influence people’s beliefs than accurate statistical information, contrary to ourpredictions. Second, and importantly, we found that the more likely someone is to say information (whether accurateor inaccurate) can change other peoples beliefs, the more likely they are to debate important social issues in an effort tocorrect their misconceptions.