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where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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It's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, the psychology of misinformation.

I talk with Matthew Facciani, author and social scientist,

about how we can understand more about misinformation by thinking about how our psychological biases

influence how we process information. We also talk about ways to be more empathetic to reduce

polarization and how to build up our own immunity against false information. Let's listen. Matthew Facciani, thank you so much for being on public telephone call. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm okay. Hanging in there. So we're talking to you today about misinformation. Something that we've really covered quite a bit in this podcast, but we're going to come at it from a unique angle.

And part of that angle is, would you tell us a little bit about your background and your work?

Yeah, so I do have a bit of an interdisciplinary background, a bit of a unique path to where I am right now.

I started studying neuroscience and graduate school, FMRI research, specifically trying to understand how the brain processes images

and words and emotions.

And I found that

really interesting, but I

realized I was more interested in broader questions

of how do

beliefs form and how do people process

information and how do social factors influence information, how do beliefs form and how do people process information and how do social factors influence

information how do two people read the same thing and come to very different conclusions so i was

able to change majors in graduate school and study social psychology sociology and understand how to study those types of questions

...