I am a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute and a fellow at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences. My research investigates what drives belief in inaccurate information, why certain individuals are predisposed to refrain from belief change even in the face of good corrective evidence, and how corrections can be designed to maximize impact.

I’m currently interested in the processing of misinformation in older adult populations.

Publications

Swire-Thompson, B., Ecker, U. K.H., Swire, B., Lewandowsky, S., & Berinsky, A. J. (in press). They might be a liar but they’re my liar: Source evaluation and the prevalence of misinformation. Political Psychology.

Grinberg, N., Joseph, K., Friedland, L., Swire-Thompson, B. , & Lazer, D. (2019). Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election. Science, 363(6425), 374-378.

Swire, B. & Ecker, U. K. H. (2018). Misinformation and its correction: Cognitive mechanisms and recommendations for mass communication. In. B. Southwell, E. A. Thorson, & L. Sheble. (Eds), Misinformation and Mass Audiences. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Aird, M. J., Ecker, U. K., Swire, B., Berinsky, A. J., & Lewandowsky, S. (2018). Does truth matter to voters? The effects of correcting political misinformation in an Australian sample. Royal Society Open Science, 5(12), 180593.

Swire, B., Ecker, U. K. H. & Lewandowsky, S. (2017). The role of familiarity in correcting inaccurate information, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. pdf

Swire, B., Berinsky, A., J., Lewandowsky, S., & Ecker, U. K. H. (2017). Processing political misinformation—Comprehending the Trump phenomenon, Royal Society Open Science. pdf

Ecker, U. K. H., Swire, B., & Lewandowsky, S. (2014). Correcting misinformation—A challenge for education and cognitive science. In D. N. Rapp & J. Braasch. (Eds.), Processing Inaccurate Information: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives from Cognitive Science and the Educational Sciences. (pp. 13-38). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pdf

Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Swire, B., & Chang, D. (2011). Correcting false information in memory: Manipulating the strength of misinformation encoding and its retraction. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 18, 570-578. pdf