Psychology of belief formation and reasoning

How people form, maintain, and revise beliefs about factual claims; the psychological mechanisms that make people susceptible to false information; and why corrections often fail.

Key papers

• van Prooijen & Douglas (2018) — Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domain — special issue introduction synthesizing the emerging research domain around four foundational principles: consequential, universal, emotional, and social drivers of conspiracy belief; emphasizes that emotional sense-making and intergroup conflict are primary drivers, not just cognitive errors or knowledge deficits
• Lewandowsky et al. (2012) — Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing — foundational review of cognitive mechanisms (mental models, source confusion, fluency heuristics, coherence effects) underlying belief in misinformation and resistance to correction; evidence-based debiasing strategies
• van der Linden et al. (2017) — Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change — examines motivated reasoning and identity-protective cognition in response to competing messages; shows that pre-emptive warnings about misleading tactics can overcome polarization and reduce directional motivated reasoning
• Acerbi (2019) — Cognitive attraction and online misinformation — argues that misinformation succeeds because it taps into evolved cognitive preferences (negative bias, threat-related content, social information) rather than because digital media is broken; frames misinformation as "high-quality" content optimized for psychological appeal
• Roozenbeek & van der Linden (2019) — Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation — empirical validation of inoculation theory through experiential learning; demonstrates psychological mechanisms underlying resistance-building to deceptive techniques
• Effron & Raj (2020) — Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share — demonstrates that moral intuitions about sharing misinformation weaken with familiarity independent of belief; fluency-driven moral desensitization distinct from illusory-truth effects on epistemic judgment
• Ecker et al. (2022) — The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction — comprehensive review of cognitive (intuitive thinking, memory failures, illusory truth), social (source credibility, in-group bias), and affective (emotion, mood-dependent belief) drivers of false belief formation