19 Nov 2025
Certain and Wrong: Why False Facts Feel True | Wired For This
Today, we’re joined by Cecilie S. Traberg.
The transcript for this episode will be available the day following the original airdate.
Links/Sources mentioned:
Dr. Traberg’s website: https://www.cecilietraberg.com/ (https://www.cecilietraberg.com/)
Solomon’s Secret (https://www.cecilietraberg.com/solomonssecret), a digital murder mystery game designed to explore the psychology of misinformation and social influence
Dr. Traberg’s research:
Traberg, C. S., Roozenbeek, J., & van der Linden, S. (2022). Psychological Inoculation against Misinformation: Current Evidence and Future Directions (https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162221087936). The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 700(1), 136–151.
Traberg, C. S., & van der Linden, S. (2022). Birds of a feather are persuaded together: Perceived source credibility mediates the effect of political bias on misinformation susceptibility (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111269). Personality and Individual Differences, 185, 111269.
Traberg, C. S., Roozenbeek, J., & van der Linden, S. (2024). Gamified inoculation reduces susceptibility to misinformation from political ingroups (https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/gamified-inoculation-reduces-susceptibility-to-misinformation-from-political-ingroups/). Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review.
Traberg, C. S., Harjani, T., Roozenbeek, J., & van der Linden, S. (2024). The persuasive effects of social cues and source effects on misinformation susceptibility (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54030-y). Scientific Reports, 14(1).
Cecilie Traberg, Morten, T., & van. (2024). Counteracting socially endorsed misinformation through an emotion-fallacy inoculation (https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00017). Advances In/Psychology, 2.
Other relevant studies:
Marks, J., Copland, E., Loh, E., Sunstein, C. R., & Tali Sharot. (2018). Epistemic spillovers: Learning others’ political views reduces the ability to assess and use their expertise in nonpolitical domains (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.10.003). Cognition, 188, 74–84.
Hassoun, A., Beacock, I., Consolvo, S., Goldberg, B., Kelley, P. G., & Russell, D. M. (2023). Practicing information sensibility: How Gen Z engages with online information (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3544548.3581328). In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-17).
Vidgen, B., Taylor, H., Pantazi, M., Anastasiou, Z., Inkster, B., & Margetts, H. (2021). Understanding vulnerability to online misinformation (https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-02/misinformation_report_final1_0.pdf).
Gawronski, B., Ng, N. L., & Luke, D. M. (2023). Truth sensitivity and partisan bias in responses to misinformation (https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001381). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Garrett, R. K., & Bond, R. M. (2021). Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions (https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234). Science Advances, 7(23).
One example of unintentionally spread misinformation: How a simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils (https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/black-plastic)
Some examples of (earned) distrust of institutions:
5 times the US government revealed secrets it tried to keep hidden (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/us-government-conspiracy-declassified-secrets)
Why we know so little about women’s health (https://www.aamc.org/news/why-we-know-so-little-about-women-s-health)
NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet (https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet)
Wired For This is produced and edited by Nwabata Nnani and hosted by Celia Ford.
American Scientist has been in publication since 1913 and is published by the nonprofit Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society. The magazine focuses on producing narrative-driven features by scientists about their own peer-reviewed work. The publication also produces shorter-form staff-written news articles, as well as blogs, multimedia, and social media. See more at www.americanscientist.org (http://www.americanscientist.org/)
Subscribe to American Scientist: https://subscribe.americanscientist.org/AMS/?f=paid (https://subscribe.americanscientist.org/AMS/?f=paid)
Music by Nat Keefe
Follow us on social media:
Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/americanscientist.org)
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AmericanScientist)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/american_scientist)
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/american-scientist/)
