Misinformation is often approached as a problem of information quality: provide people with better facts, expose falsehoods, improve fact-checking, and inaccurate beliefs should recede. But research in social and political psychology suggests that the problem runs considerably deeper.

People do not encounter information as detached observers. What they believe, share, reject, or defend can also be shaped by identity, belonging, trust, reputation, group norms, and the social consequences of changing one’s mind. When a belief becomes intertwined with membership in a political, national, religious, or ideological community, correcting it can become much more complicated than simply presenting stronger evidence.

These dynamics have become particularly consequential in digital information environments. Social media platforms do more than distribute information: they create systems of visibility and social reward. Content that signals loyalty, expresses moral outrage, or attacks an opposing group can attract attention and engagement, while nuance, uncertainty, and compromise often struggle to generate the same response.

In this conversation with Eurasia Review, Professor Jay Van Bavel delves deep into how social identity shapes what people perceive as credible, whom they trust, what they remember, and how they interpret competing versions of reality. Drawing on his identity-based model of political belief, first outlined in his widely cited paper, The Partisan Brain,  he explains why people frequently pursue accuracy and identity goals simultaneously, and why misinformation cannot always be understood simply as a failure of reasoning.

Jay J. Van Bavel, PhD, is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU), where he also directs the Social Identity & Morality Lab and the Center for Conflict & Cooperation, and serves as an affiliate at NYU’s Stern School of Business. His research examines how social identity, group norms, moral values, and political beliefs shape perception, judgment, decision-making, and collective behaviour. He is also co-author, with Dominic Packer, of The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony, winner of the 2022 William James Book Award.

The discussion explores why trusted in-group messengers can be particularly effective in correcting false beliefs; how platform design and engagement incentives interact with human psychology; why moral-emotional and out-group-hostile content can thrive online; and how institutions can make accuracy, intellectual humility, and constructive disagreement part of their internal culture rather than treating fact-checking as an external corrective.

Prof. Van Bavel also distinguishes ideological disagreement from affective polarization. Democratic societies can accommodate profound differences over policy and values. The more serious danger arises when political opponents are no longer regarded as fellow citizens with competing views, but as fundamentally immoral, threatening, or less deserving of trust and cooperation. At the heart of the conversation is a larger question about the resilience of shared reality: if social identity can shape not only what people believe, but also whom they trust and how they interpret evidence, how can societies create information environments in which accuracy, disagreement, and belonging are not mutually exclusive?

Q1. Your identity-based model of political belief suggests that people often weigh accuracy goals against identity goals. How does this model change the way we should understand misinformation, especially when false or misleading claims become markers of loyalty to a political, national, religious, or ideological group?

A: One of the biggest........

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