backfire-effect-repilation-wood-2019
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Confirmation_bias-chunk-4.md
Created 2026-08-25T02:58:46+00:00
Wood et al.'s replication study with 10,100 participants across 52 issues found no evidence for the backfire effect originally claimed by Nyhan & Reifler (2010), leading to the conclusion that the effect is rare or nonexistent.
Summary
A very large follow-up study found that correcting people's factual errors does not typically cause them to cling more strongly to the wrong idea, contradicting the widely cited finding that it does. For the system, this means factual corrections should be treated as generally safe or effective tools for changing minds, rather than as interventions that risk digging in the other side harder.