Dispelling misconceptions about economics

Jordi Brandts, Isabel Busom (), Cristina Lopez-Mayan and Judith Panadés

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2022, vol. 88, issue C

Abstract: Some popular views about the workings of the economy are completely at odds with solid empirical evidence and congruent theoretical explanations and therefore can be qualified as misconceptions. Such beliefs lead to support for harmful policies. Cognitive biases may contribute to explaining why misconceptions persist even when scientific information is provided to people. We conduct two experimental studies to investigate, for the first time in economics, whether presenting information in a refutational way affects people’s beliefs about an important socio-economic issue on which expert consensus is very strong: the harmful effects of rent controls. In the laboratory (Study 1) both our refutational and non-refutational messages induce a belief change in the direction of expert knowledge. The refutational message, however, does not improve significantly on the non-refutational one. In the field (Study 2), where participants are college students receiving economic training, the refutational text improves, subject to some caveats, on standard instruction but not on the non-refutational message. The main overall implications of our results are that providing information moderately reduces the misconception, but does not eliminate it, and that the refutational approach does not work better than providing the same information in a non-refutational manner.

Keywords: Misconceptions; Cognitive bias; Refutation; Experiment; Economic communication; Rent control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 A2 D9 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Working Paper: Dispelling Misconceptions about Economics (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:88:y:2022:i:c:s016748702100091x

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2021.102461

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