False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True
In this post, Joe Pierre, professor of psychology at UC San Francisco, discusses his recently published book, False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True (OUP, 2025)
As a psychiatrist, my clinical work as a psychiatrist through the years has focused on the treatment of people with psychotic disorders. But in my academic work, I’ve been drawn to the grey area between psychopathology and normality and especially the continuum of delusion-like beliefs and full-blown delusions that includes religious, ideological, and conspiracy theory beliefs.
In psychiatry, false beliefs like cognitive distortions or delusions are typically chalked up to psychopathology. People have cognitive distortions because they have major depressive disorderand people are delusional because they have schizophrenia. And although research might tell us that delusional thinking can be attributed to anomalous subjective experiences or a “jumping to conclusions” cognitive style, those are ultimately considered to be part of the psychotic processes. One way or another then, false beliefs in psychiatry are explained by something going wrong in our brains.
And yet, we know all too well that false beliefs—including those that are sometimes held with unassailable, delusion-like conviction—are hardly limited to those with mental illness. Most of us hold some beliefs like that, whether they’re so-called positive illusions (e.g., the belief that we’re better than average), religious faiths, or political ideologies. But if we’re not mentally ill and such false beliefs are in fact normal, then we shouldn’t (and psychiatry doesn’t) use psychopathology to explain them away.
Much of my academic writing has been motivated by trying to resolve a question in my mind. And since I couldn’t find a good, “one-stop shopping” source of information on why normal people can hold so tenaciously to false beliefs, I decided to write a book about it myself. After several years of drafting and rewriting the text and finding a publisher in Oxford University press, I’m pleased to say that False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True was finally released in March 2025.
The book may as well have been entitled Imperfect Cognitions since it focuses on exactly that—the less-than-optimal cognitive processes that underlie false belief in normal people like you and me. It begins by covering ground that includes the false beliefs of mental illness like delusions and cognitive distortions, while drawing a clear line in the sand to help the reader distinguish between clinical delusions and mere delusion-like beliefs despite the temptation to conflate the two. It then moves on to the overconfidence of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and fallible memories, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning before making its way to cognitive dissonance and bullshit receptivity.
In addition to such individual-level explanations, False sidesteps the fundamental attribution error to highlight social contributors to false belief including mistrust, misinformation, and the group identity aspects of motivated reasoning. While I sometimes refer to this as a “socio-epistemic” model, lately I’ve taken to calling it a “3M Model” (although the publisher didn’t like the alliteration and had me substitute “disinformation” for “misinformation” in the book’s subtitle). Whatever it’s called, it’s my opinion that emphasizing mistrust, misinformation, and motivated reasoning helps to provide a universal and normalizing framework to understand false belief in place of pejorative and wrongheaded claims that the world—or at least our ideological opposites—has fallen victim to the likes of mass delusion or mass psychosis.
Although False provides an overview of research on imperfect cognitions and is densely referenced (this seemed like a necessity for a book on false beliefs), it was written for the lay reader and is loaded with anecdotes to illustrate its points. In the second half, it tackles timely subjects like political polarization, morality, and climate change head on before concluding with recommendations for how to steer both individuals and societies away from believing things that aren’t true and acting upon false beliefs.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to argue that the world isn’t headed in exactly the wrong direction at the moment. Instead of moving closer to truth, belief in misinformation is running rampant, paving the way for authoritarian regimes to bulldoze democratic institutions with foolhardy political policies that are dismantling government services, defunding scientific research, and destroying public health networks and consumer protections.
In my obviously biased opinion as its author, False couldn’t be more relevant today, although part of me wishes that wasn’t the case. And yet, if we can better understand and appreciate why people so easily fall victim to misinformation and defend their false beliefs so passionately, then maybe it can help us work on solutions to get us back on track as individuals and as societies. With that in mind, if more people read False, it might become less relevant in the future. I hope that happens.
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| False |
As a psychiatrist, my clinical work as a psychiatrist through the years has focused on the treatment of people with psychotic disorders. But in my academic work, I’ve been drawn to the grey area between psychopathology and normality and especially the continuum of delusion-like beliefs and full-blown delusions that includes religious, ideological, and conspiracy theory beliefs.
And yet, we know all too well that false beliefs—including those that are sometimes held with unassailable, delusion-like conviction—are hardly limited to those with mental illness. Most of us hold some beliefs like that, whether they’re so-called positive illusions (e.g., the belief that we’re better than average), religious faiths, or political ideologies. But if we’re not mentally ill and such false beliefs are in fact normal, then we shouldn’t (and psychiatry doesn’t) use psychopathology to explain them away.
Much of my academic writing has been motivated by trying to resolve a question in my mind. And since I couldn’t find a good, “one-stop shopping” source of information on why normal people can hold so tenaciously to false beliefs, I decided to write a book about it myself. After several years of drafting and rewriting the text and finding a publisher in Oxford University press, I’m pleased to say that False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True was finally released in March 2025.
The book may as well have been entitled Imperfect Cognitions since it focuses on exactly that—the less-than-optimal cognitive processes that underlie false belief in normal people like you and me. It begins by covering ground that includes the false beliefs of mental illness like delusions and cognitive distortions, while drawing a clear line in the sand to help the reader distinguish between clinical delusions and mere delusion-like beliefs despite the temptation to conflate the two. It then moves on to the overconfidence of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and fallible memories, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning before making its way to cognitive dissonance and bullshit receptivity.
In addition to such individual-level explanations, False sidesteps the fundamental attribution error to highlight social contributors to false belief including mistrust, misinformation, and the group identity aspects of motivated reasoning. While I sometimes refer to this as a “socio-epistemic” model, lately I’ve taken to calling it a “3M Model” (although the publisher didn’t like the alliteration and had me substitute “disinformation” for “misinformation” in the book’s subtitle). Whatever it’s called, it’s my opinion that emphasizing mistrust, misinformation, and motivated reasoning helps to provide a universal and normalizing framework to understand false belief in place of pejorative and wrongheaded claims that the world—or at least our ideological opposites—has fallen victim to the likes of mass delusion or mass psychosis.
Although False provides an overview of research on imperfect cognitions and is densely referenced (this seemed like a necessity for a book on false beliefs), it was written for the lay reader and is loaded with anecdotes to illustrate its points. In the second half, it tackles timely subjects like political polarization, morality, and climate change head on before concluding with recommendations for how to steer both individuals and societies away from believing things that aren’t true and acting upon false beliefs.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to argue that the world isn’t headed in exactly the wrong direction at the moment. Instead of moving closer to truth, belief in misinformation is running rampant, paving the way for authoritarian regimes to bulldoze democratic institutions with foolhardy political policies that are dismantling government services, defunding scientific research, and destroying public health networks and consumer protections.
In my obviously biased opinion as its author, False couldn’t be more relevant today, although part of me wishes that wasn’t the case. And yet, if we can better understand and appreciate why people so easily fall victim to misinformation and defend their false beliefs so passionately, then maybe it can help us work on solutions to get us back on track as individuals and as societies. With that in mind, if more people read False, it might become less relevant in the future. I hope that happens.