Cognitive entrenchment in the post-truth era: psychological mechanisms of disinformation maintenance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34019/1981-4070.2026.v20.49840Keywords:
disinformation, cognitive bias, communication psychology.Abstract
This review of Persistence of misinformation: biased cognitive processing and polarization (Zhou; Shen, 2025) summarizes and evaluates its central arguments, positioning the book within misinformation as a prominent global risk. The focus lies on the work’s key idea: that the resilience of false content is a specific manifestation of the biased processing of counter-attitudinal messages that challenge preexisting beliefs. The review elucidates how the authors substantiate this premise by articulating three major theoretical frameworks from social psychology: social judgment theory, cognitive dissonance theory, and motivated information processing. Furthermore, it addresses the phenomenon of attitude polarization and the main proposed mitigation strategy: psychological inoculation. The book’s primary merit is constructing a coherent explanatory framework. However, a limitation is its pronounced focus on individual cognitive processes, neglecting social and interpersonal dimensions of polarization, like group deliberation dynamics and social identity.
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