Fact checks are a big part of election season.
What's worth fact checking?
What's the best way to fact check?
These are editorial decisions that media organizations encounter all the time.
In 2010, a political science paper came out that made people worry.
It suggested fact checks might actually make people dig in their heels.
What if telling people they're wrong makes them double down rather than change their minds?
For years after these findings rocked the world of political science and media,
other researchers tried to replicate them to little success.
My name's Jerusalem Dempsis.
I'm a staff writer here at the Atlantic.
And this is good on paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about the world.
One strain of conventional wisdom seems to treat fact checks as either worthless or worse than that,
actively harmful.
My guest today offers some hope and some evidence that even in polarized times,
people are open to new ideas.
Yamile Velez is a political scientist at Columbia University.
And in a new paper published in the American Political Science Review,
he and his co author, Patrick Liu find that persuasion is possible even on deeply held beliefs.
Yamile, welcome to the show.