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Providing corrective information can reduce factual misperceptions among the public but it tends to have little effect on people’s underlying attitudes. Our study examines how the impact of misinformation corrections is moderated by media choice. In our experiment, participants are asked to read a news article published by Fox News or MSNBC, each highlighting the positive economic impact of legal immigration in the United States. While the news content is held constant, our treatment manipulates whether participants are allowed to freely choose a media outlet or are randomly assigned. Our results demonstrate the importance of people’s ability to choose: While factual misperceptions are easily corrected regardless of how people gained access to information, subsequent opinion change is conditional on people’s prior willingness to seek out alternative sources. As such, encouraging people to broaden their media diet may be more effective to combat misinformation than disseminating fact-checks alone.

In this commentary, we embed the volume’s contributions on public beliefs about science in a broader theoretical discussion of motivated political reasoning. The studies presented in the preceding section of the volume consistently find evidence for hyperskepticism toward scientific evidence among ideologues, no matter the domain or context—and this skepticism seems to be stronger among conservatives than liberals. Here, we show that these patterns can be understood as part of a general tendency among individuals to defend their prior attitudes and actively challenge attitudinally incongruent arguments, a tendency that appears to be evident among liberals and conservatives alike. We integrate the empirical results reported in this volume into a broader theoretical discussion of the John Q. Public model of information processing and motivated reasoning, which posits that both affective and cognitive reactions to events are triggered unconsciously. We find that the work in this volume is largely consistent with our theories of affect-driven motivated reasoning and biased attitude formation.

Enns et al. respond to recent work by Grant and Lebo and Lebo and Grant that raises a number of concerns with political scientists’ use of the general error correction model (GECM). While agreeing with the particular rules one should apply when using unit root data in the GECM, Enns et al. still advocate procedures that will lead researchers astray. Most especially, they fail to recognize the difficulty in interpreting the GECM’s “error correction coefficient.” Without being certain of the univariate properties of one’s data it is extremely difficult (or perhaps impossible) to know whether or not cointegration exists and error correction is occurring. We demonstrate the crucial differences for the GECM between having evidence of a unit root (from Dickey–Fuller tests) versus actually having a unit root. Looking at simulations and two applied examples we show how overblown findings of error correction await the uncareful researcher.