Rethinking belief in an age of misinformation

Richard Petty ’75 MA, ’77 PhD is widely recognized as a leading expert on how people form and change their beliefs. Last year, Petty was elected to the National Academy of Sciences — one of the highest honors in science. His current research, supported by a $1.47 million grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, has created a renewed sense of interest in the rise of extremism and meaningful ways to address it.

Today Petty stands at the forefront of psychology, but the foundations of his research can be traced back to his time as an Ohio State graduate student learning from and being mentored by renowned scholars like Robert Cialdini, Tim Brock and Anthony Greenwald. It was also in graduate school where Petty and fellow graduate student John Cacioppo created the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), a theory explaining how people are persuaded either through deep reflection or by relying on quick, simple clues.

Petty and Cacioppo noticed contradictions in persuasion research. Why did a credible source persuade some people in one study but not in another? The answer, they realized, depended on how much people cared about the topic. “If you don’t care about an issue, you’re more likely to rely on simple cues like credibility,” Petty explained. “But if it’s something you care deeply about, you scrutinize the arguments themselves.” He compares this to medicine: “The exact same drug can help one person, harm another, and have no effect on a third person. You have to understand the context.”

After earning their PhDs, Petty joined the faculty at the University of Missouri, while Cacioppo headed to the University of Iowa. The two continued to collaborate over the next decade, refining the ELM through foundational studies. Petty eventually returned to Ohio State as a visiting professor and later joined the faculty full-time, returning to the university that had shaped his academic identity — this time in the role of professor and mentor to future generations of graduate students. “Ohio State is a very special place to me,” Petty said. “Our social psychology program is a real gem, and the success of our graduate students is just phenomenal.” Having served twice as chair of Ohio State’s Department of Psychology, Petty has mentored dozens of graduate students, many

of whom have gone on to earn top awards and lead programs themselves — including Ohio State’s current psychology chair Duane Wegener ’91 MA, ’94 PhD, one of his former students.

The department recently welcomed social psychologists Kurt Gray, the Weary Foundation Endowed Chair in the Social Psychology of Polarization and Misinformation, and Kristen Lindquist, the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Chair in Social Psychology. Together, they are advancing research on human behavior — Gray examining moral judgment, political polarization and AI, and Lindquist exploring the psychological and neural foundations of emotion, including how age, context and culture shape emotional experience.

“Back when I started, research on misinformation didn’t exist the way it does now. It was just research on information,” he said. “But those same principles [of the ELM] are relevant to understanding what leads people to accept both factual information as well as misinformation.” Since its creation, the ELM has become one of the most widely utilized theories in social psychology. “That’s one of the biggest surprises,” Petty said. “People have found it useful for everything from climate change and drug resistance education to artificial intelligence and political communication.”

Persuasion today involves helping people figure out what is true. “It isn’t just about giving them the correct information,” he explains. “You have to understand why people think the information is true or false and what motivates them to hold onto misinformation.” With misinformation and polarization on the rise, Petty’s research has become increasingly vital. However, he’s quick to point out that in psychology, “it’s usually not productive to say who’s right and who’s wrong, because human behavior is complex.