The focus on misinformation leads to a profound misunderstanding of why people believe and act on bad information

I’m consciously fighting confirmation bias by sharing some claims that I intuitively (irrationally?) doubt.

Contrary to widespread beliefs, the share of misinformation in most people’s information diet is minimal, conspiracy theorising does not seem to have increased in recent years, and those who consume high rates of misinformation are largely hyper-partisans or dogmatists anyway. Moreover, even when people’s misinformed beliefs are corrected, this often seems to have little effect on their behaviour.

More generally, the popular image of human beings as ‘Homo Credulous’, gullibly accepting whatever information they come across, is mistaken. Most mass propaganda and advertising campaigns fail abysmally. If anything, people trust too little than too much, placing excessive reliance on their own intuitions than on information from genuinely reliable sources. —LSE Impact Blog