Miscalibration of Knowledge and The Distortion of Misinformation: When The Need for Coherence Leads to Irrational Beliefs

How do some people come to hold irrational beliefs with intense conviction? This research takes a longitudinal experimental perspective to understand how a tentative and first belief may taint the evaluation of the perceived veracity of incoming misinformation.  Overall, we find that what you believe (e.g., believing that m-RNA vaccines are safe or unsafe) is initially not of particular importance. What is instead critical is the strength of your initial commitment to your tentative belief, i.e., the metacognition related to this initial belief.  Specifically, we find that the strength of the initial conviction predicts the extent to which individuals distort their perception of incoming misinformation veracity. We further show that knowledge miscalibration predicts the strength of initial belief commitment: people fail to see what they do not know, and thereby overcommit to their tentative belief, which drives the distortion of misinformation. Overall, five studies empirically demonstrate the process by which some individuals will come to hold strong irrational beliefs. Even though we may expect or hope that people are naturally motivated to “look for” the truth when consuming media content, our results tend to show that we tend to tread on accuracy for maintaining coherence.