Identity and Epistemic Emotions During Knowledge Revision: A Potential Account for the Backfire Effect

Recent research has shown that for some topics, messages to refute and revise misconceptions may backfire. The current research offers one possible account for this backfire effect (i.e., the ironic strengthening of belief in erroneous information after an attempted refutation) from an educational psychology perspective and examines whether emotions mediate the relationship between self-concept and learning from refutation texts. In an...