The persistence and peril of misinformation

The persistence and peril of misinformation Brian Southwell looks at how human brains verify information and discusses some of the challenges of battling widespread falsehoods Misinformation – both deliberately promoted and accidentally shared -is perhaps an inevitable part of the world in which we live, but it is not a new problem. People likely have lied to one another for roughly as long as verbal communication has existed. Deceiving others can offer an apparent opportunity to gain strategic advantage, to motivate others to action, or even to protect interpersonal bonds. Moreover, people inadvertently have been sharing inaccurate information with one another for thousands of years. However, we currently live in an era in which technology enables information to reach large audiences distributed across the globe,and thus the potential for immediate and widespread effects from misinformation now looms larger than in the past. Yet the means to correct misinformation might,over time,be found in those same patterns of mass communication and of the facilitated spread of information. The main worry regarding misinformation is its potential to unduly influence attitudes and behavior, leading people to think and act differently than they would if they were correctly informed, as suggested by the research teams of Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol and Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University, among others. In other words, we worry that misinformation might lead people to hold misperceptions (or false beliefs) and that these misperceptions, especially when they occur…