When you open the newspaper or turn on the nightly news or scroll the internet, is what you

were reading and seeing true? How do you know? What is fake news and why does it seem to be everywhere?

Americans are worried about fake news. A 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center found that half of

Americans said that made up news is a very big problem.

68% said it affects our confidence in government institutions, and 54% said it is having a major

impact on our confidence in each other. But what does the research say? Why do people believe fake

news? How easily does misinformation spread? And once a

person believes a lie, is it possible to convince them of the truth? Welcome to speaking of

psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the

links between psychological science and everyday life.

I'm Kim Mills.

Our guest today is Dr. Dolores Albarsine, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

She studies attitudes, persuasion, and behavior, and has looked at how people respond to misinformation in areas including politics, vaccines, and other health behaviors. Welcome to speaking of psychology, Dr. Albarcine.

Thank you, Kim. Thanks for having me. Do you published a study that looked at psychologists' research

on debunking, that is, changing people's minds once they've

been presented with misinformation. Once someone believes a piece of misinformation, is it

possible to correct that belief? What did you find?

Yes, within that study, which was published in psychological science in 2017, and this was a

meta-analysis of the impact of misinformation presented in the

news or similar types of print. So a lot of this is, of course, experimental work, and that was

what we were after. So the meta-analysis, which is a collection of all the evidence on a problem in a

quantitative way, involves collecting all the research that have been done on misinformation

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