From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Ladstone.

This week, we're talking about stuff we think we know about, but in fact, we don't know.

From our archives, we've pulled stories of debunkings of stories great and small

that have served as cultural signposts,

sending us in the wrong direction. Some of these stories seem impervious to change because we

like them as they are. They make sense to us. They fit in with what we think we know. Brendan Nyhan is

a blogger and assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College.

He's part of a team that for the last few years has been studying how people so easily ignore corrections to the record.

The latest study tested a new way to blow past our inborn barriers, but it seems to have fizzled too.

Brendan, welcome to the show. Thanks very much.

Now, this study is building off previous research that you've done on correcting misperceptions.

Research, in fact, that we've covered on the show, but can you give us just a quick rundown

of what those earlier experiments showed? Sure. My co-author, Jason Rifler, and I,

looked at can the media effectively correct misperceptions, which seems like a simple question, but no one had really tested that scientifically.

And you found actually that when people had their misperceptions challenged, certain people at least were more likely to become more firmly entrenched in that

belief. That's right. People were so successful at bringing to mind reasons that the correction

was wrong, they actually ended up being more convinced in the misperception than the people who

didn't receive the correction. So the correction, in other words, was making things worse.

So tell me about your latest study.

What we wanted to understand was whether it was possible to correct the misperception out there that Barack Obama is a Muslim, which has been shown to be held by 10 to 12 percent of the public.

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