All right, I’m back. So in honor of the last talk, we’re doing some space learning here with me coming back. So this is some of my newest research with my co-author, Jason Ryeflour. What I’m going to do in the hopefully in the next eight minutes is share some ideas we have that try to go a little deeper into why misperceptions are so common and what implications those understandings might have for how we can most effectively correct them. I still don’t have a working quicker, so can you advance it please? All right, so the problem we talked about before is of course that so many Americans are misinformed about all sorts of issues. And the question is why? So if we can go to the next slide. Oh, there we go. Now you’re really going to vote for me. OK, so the first explanation you might think is people simply have a hard time soaring through all the information that’s out there. There’s a cacophony of competing claims about some of these controversial factual and scientific issues. Was 9-11 an inside job? Is the climate warming? Is GMO food safe to eat? Those are hard questions for people to figure out. Almost none of us are climate scientists or structural engineers or food safety experts. And so we have a hard time sorting through the kinds of information that’s out there, especially when it’s often presented in a dry and inaccessible way. So if this account is correct, what it suggests is that we might need to try to figure out how to present information in a way that’s more compelling to people. And so one example of how you might do this comes in the form of graphical or visual information. So this is from a press release that NASA issues showing temperature data from four independent sources that documents just how significant the global warming trend is. But more importantly shows that these four independent sources of data track together almost perfectly. So there’s often people who try to raise doubts about the data on climate change. And I think this is a really compelling illustration that these four independent data sources are telling almost precisely the same story. And we think this is more compelling than the equivalent textual information that was provided in the same press release as this study. But the second problem goes deeper, I think. And you won’t be surprised in the last talk to hear that I think that it has to do, in part with the psychology of false belief. It’s not just a problem of a lack of information. It’s really difficult for us to admit we’re wrong. That disconfirmation bias that we talked about earlier is, I think, a big part of the misperception’s problem. And the reason, I think, is that it’s very threatening for us to admit that we’re wrong. There are certain issues, of course, that we’re all willing to admit that we’re wrong. So if I ask you who’s the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, many of you wouldn’t know, but you probably recognize that you don’t actually know the correct answer. But when it comes to issues that are meaningful to you, to your identity, to your sense of self, to your worldview, it can be much more difficult to admit that we’re wrong. It can be very threatening or disconcerting. And if that’s true, then the mindset that people approach these questions with may matter as much as the information we give them. It’s not simply a matter of giving people information, but it’s the mindset that they’re using when they think about these issues. And the threat that that information might pose to their worldview or values their sense of self that can drive some of these misperceptions. So how can we test that? That’s a hard question. So we brought in a classroom from social psychology called self-affirmation. And it’s a bit of an artificial exercise, but it’s a great way to test this idea. And what we asked respondents to do is to choose a value that’s important to them and to write a brief essay about a time that they have held that value. And the idea is that by buffering people’s sense of self in some unrelated domain, that might make them better able to admit that they’re wrong or be more open minded in some other domain. And so what happens when you do that? We did three studies. I’m going to show one, share one example with you now. This is looking at the troop surge in Iraq. So some of you may remember late in President Bush’s term that war in Iraq wasn’t going well and people were increasingly calling for the U.S. to get out of Iraq. And instead, President Bush sent more troops. Okay. And that was a controversial move that was widely opposed by people who didn’t like the war. But it did seem to have the intended effect. So when the troop surge happened, attacks on coalition forces in Iraq went down. And it went down a lot. So what my co-author and I wanted to do was see if we gave that information to people in graphical form, what effect would it have on their beliefs, their potential misperceptions about the effectiveness of the troop surge, which opponents of the war in Iraq were likely to think was ineffective. And this is what those data look like. This is the graphical correction we shared with people. And you can see that attacks on coalition forces dropped dramatically after the troop surge began. But what we also did was we randomized some people to do that self-affirmation exercise I described to you earlier. And what we found is really striking. So we’re zooming in here on supporters of withdrawal from Iraq, the group that’s most predisposed to think the surge didn’t work. And you can see that on the right, people who saw the graph were less likely to think that attacks had increased as a result of the surge, which was a misperception. So that graphical information has worked. But that self-affirmation alone, with no other information provided, reduced misperceptions almost as much as showing people the actual data. So just changing the mindset that people bring to these questions can have a really powerful congenerate, really powerful response. Okay, so what does this mean in the real world where, of course, you can’t ask people to write little essays about how great they are? Well, there are some things you can do. First, we can incorporate visual and graphical information in different ways. This is a CNN article I love about the birth or myth that has giant graphics of President Obama’s birth certificate and the contemporaneous announcement in a Hawaiian newspaper of his birth at the top. There’s no way to ignore them there right in your face from the beginning. That may be more compelling than textual information. But it may also be possible, even if you can’t go through that self-affirmation process, to present information in a way that doesn’t threaten people’s values. Let me show you two examples of that. The first comes from a political scientist in Western Australia I met who was trying to promote vaccination in her community, which is left-leaning, supportive of natural health, and suspicious of conventional medicine. And so when she promoted vaccination to her community, she used images of people from the community in a way that reinforced that showed that these people shared the values of the other members of their community and they vaccinated. So it said things like, I use cloth nappies, which is what they call diapers, I breastfeed. So it’s signaling I’m one of you and I vaccinated. This is consistent with our values as members of this community. And from a really different perspective, this Ford F-150 had. The audience for these trucks, most of them would not think of themselves environmentalists. But fuel economy is one of the selling points of the new model. How do you promote that? So they’d say, it’s simple, burn less fuel, burn less cash. It’s presented in a way that’s consistent with the kinds of values that people who might buy that truck would hold rather than putting out an environmental message that might be ineffective. There’s a study that found that putting environmental labels on energy efficient light bulbs actually made conservatives less likely to buy them rather than more. It was an uncomfortable thing. So there are different ways you can promote corrective information that don’t threaten people’s values. And I think we should think about how we can do that. Thanks a lot.