A comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the important subject of misinformation. Here you will find a theoretical background as well as practical advice and tools, and many examples of this phenomenon, like medical misinformation related to COVID-19 or conspiracy theories. Worth reading, even if you are familiar with the concept.

Thanks to the publisher, Columbia University Press, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

Cheers to Netgalley for sending this copy across. As a psychologist, this book has a fantastic breakdown of how cognitive influences, social influences and everything in between affect us in the era of misinformation. If you are someone who has no psychology background, I'm sure this book is even more useful for you because of the lack of jargon. An easy read and super informative non-fiction book, for you to read this year!

This review will be coming out for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy in the next several weeks...I am currently reading the work, which provides a great deal of practical information about all forms of information that need to be vetted more carefully. Look out for the review.

Falsehoods Fly covers the dangers of misinformation and ways to combat it. As someone who has read a decent amount of books and articles about misinformation, I didn't find much newer information. I'd definitely recommend this for people who are new to the topic.

I had expected "Falsehoods Fly" to provide fresh insights and practical strategies for combatting misinformation. However, the book diverges from this expectation.

I anticipated new information to be shared and practical ways to stop misinformation. This is not quite what Falsehoods Fly is. It shares fairly well-established insights again in an acronym model the author created and the fits major world topics into the model in a demonstration of how it played out. I was not looking to rehash the past but rather consider ways to prevent it. Not one for me.

A lot has been written about the spread of fake news and misinformation, some from a political science point of view, others from a psychological one. Thagard includes a little bit of both throughout the book. Although his writing is concise and easy to be absorbed into, I didn't feel like anything too new was discussed here. The strength of the book was in its organization: it was fascinating to read about misinformation centered around a particular event or idea in each chapter. The strongest chapter was that on climate change, as it merged the cognitive with the scientific research. I'm certain some will still see Thagard as a bumbling liberal towing the leftist line with some of his writing, but there isn't much to say against detractors like these.
The book would be great for someone to begin a syntopical project on "fake news" and misbelief. It's well-written and well-organized enough to set a high bar for reading other works on the subject.