Backfire Effect

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler coined the term in their 2010 paper "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions" in Political Behavior, reporting that factual corrections sometimes increased rather than reduced belief in political misperceptions. The finding attracted wide attention, but subsequent studies — including follow-up work by Nyhan and Reifler themselves — largely failed to replicate the effect, and by the early 2020s most researchers considered large-scale backfire effects rare or nonexistent.