Original title: Partisans are more likely to entrench their beliefs in misinformation when political outgroup members correct claims
Diego A. Reinero, Elizabeth Ann Harris, Steve Rathje, Annie Duke +1 · September 2026
MisinformationFalse or misleading information that is spread, often intentionally. is a serious problem, and fact-checks often fail to fix it on polarized issuesTopics where people strongly disagree based on their political identity.. People even debate whether corrections can backfireWhen a correction has the opposite effect, making someone believe the false claim more strongly. and make people cling to false claims more strongly. Researchers ran three experiments to see if the political identity of the person giving the correction changes the outcome. They discovered that corrections do reduce false beliefs on average. However, the identity of the speaker matters a lot. When a correction came from a political rival rather than a member of someone's own political group, it was far more likely to backfire. People ended up holding onto the false claims even more tightly. In fact, a person's political bias shaped their initial beliefs much more strongly than corrections did, especially when famous politicians were involved.
You visit a website and it says your city's weather is sunny. A friend from out of town says it's actually raining. You might check another source. But if a rival fan of a different sports team tells you it's raining, you might insist it's sunny to spite them. Here, corrections from the opposing political side can make people hold onto a false claim even more, just like the sports rival's warning makes you insist on the sunny forecast.
If a fact-check comes from someone in the other party, it can backfire and make people believe the falsehood more. This means fact-checkers and campaigns need to carefully choose who delivers corrections on polarized issues. Misinformation persists partly because corrections often come from the wrong source.
The abstract does not explicitly state limitations, but it notes that corrections work on average and backfires occur 23% of the time, suggesting the effect is not universal. The experiments likely involved U.S. political contexts, and the findings may not generalize to non-political misinformation or other countries. The specific mechanisms driving the backfire effect are not fully detailed.
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Partisans are more likely to entrench their beliefs in misinformation when political outgroup members correct claims — Diego A. Reinero, Elizabeth Ann Harris, Steve Rathje et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/z4df3_v3
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.