You can finally convince someone they're wrong about a fact, but that doesn't mean they'll ever trust the person who corrected them.
April 6, 2026
Original Paper
Evidence resistance in polarized information environments: updating political beliefs and trust in news sources
PsyArXiv · qewfy_v1
AI-generated illustration
The Takeaway
Research shows that while people are surprisingly willing to correct a false belief when shown a fact-check, their trust in the news source itself is almost impossible to move. This explains why misinformation persists even when facts are available: we may accept the truth while still resenting the messenger.
From the abstract
Misinformed and polarized beliefs often persist despite repeated fact-checking efforts. This resistance to evidence is amplified by contextual features of political information environments and underlies political motives that distort judgments about which policy information is accurate and which media source is reliable. Across two preregistered experiments (N = 735), participants evaluated the accuracy of political news headlines from a reliable and an unreliable source. After each initial eva