Nearly all these efforts rest on the assumption that good information is the antidote to misinformation. But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information.
It is shame that the Washington Post published this article before the study has even been published. If the experiments were poorly designed the results may not actually show what the Washington Post and the authors of this study actually think they show.
via Jonah Lerher and Marc Ambinder
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