Misguided: The Podcast explores how social and psychological forces shape our understanding of the world. Hosted by social scientist Matthew Facciani, the show delves into the latest insights from sociology, psychology, and information science. Matthew shares his own research and engages in thought-provoking conversations with guests from diverse backgrounds.
In this episode of Misguided: The Podcast, I’m joined by Jennifer Hauser, who leads health and trust work at Edelman. Jen started her own health communications firm at 24, sold it to Havas in 2002, and has spent her career exploring how people take ownership of their health in a rapidly changing information environment. Her work today focuses on what trust needs to look like in a world where people have more tools, more voices, and more information than ever before.
We begin by discussing findings from this year’s Edelman Health Trust Barometer, including the special analysis we did together with the Yale School of Public Health. People still trust their doctors most, but they are also turning to friends, family, creators, and AI chatbots when making health decisions. Jen explains that many people seek out these sources because they feel more heard, can ask questions without judgment, and get answers right away. As she puts it, health is deeply human, and people want to feel understood.
From there, we dig into what the data says about earning trust. When people were asked what would convince them to follow a recommendation they had doubts about, most wanted a provider who understood their circumstances and welcomed their questions. We also discuss a surprising finding about people who hold divisive health beliefs. They are not disengaged. They are often highly engaged with the healthcare system and are much more likely to trust providers who show up in their communities.
We close by looking ahead to the growing role of AI in health decisions. Jen shares why health organizations need to make sure trusted information is discoverable by chatbots, and why she is hopeful that AI can free up doctors to spend more time doing what matters most: connecting with patients.
You can listen to the full episode here or via the links below. As always, if you find my podcast useful or interesting, feel free to share it with someone who might also enjoy it.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit matthewfacciani.substack.com/subscribe
What Wellness Influencers Don't Want You to Know
jeudi 10 septembre 2026 • Durée 55:35
A few years ago, Andrea Ellis was a rising wellness influencer. She was a certified integrative health practitioner, made six figures a year from Instagram alone, and had built a community of followers who trusted her the way you’d trust a close friend. Today, she’s one of the most thoughtful critics of the industry.
I sat down with Andrea for the latest episode of Misguided: The Podcast, and we dive into not just why people fall for wellness misinformation, but the actual business mechanics behind it, and how closely those mechanics mirror the “Big Pharma” boogeyman the wellness world defines itself against.
The wellness influencer economy
People in medical freedom and wellness spaces often portray pharmaceutical companies as a shadowy cabal, accusing them of paying doctors under the table to push medications, hiding side effects, and profiting off sickness.
But as Andrea explained, the wellness influencer economy can involve direct commissions for supplement sales, kickbacks for every lab test ordered, payments for name-dropping a product in a ten-second Instagram story, and very little oversight. Supplement companies still email her offers today, years after she stepped away from the industry. The dollar amounts she described, including thousands of dollars for steering clients toward a certification program and hundreds for a few seconds of screen time, make the “shill” accusation cut both ways.
Faith, identity, and the pipeline
Andrea and I also discussed how the wellness worldview maps onto certain Christian narrative frameworks: a fallen world, forces working against your health and wellbeing, the need to discern truth from deception, and the expectation that living rightly will draw persecution.
Andrea described a pipeline she saw play out in real time during COVID: faith → conservative politics → conspiratorial thinking → wellness, with each reinforcing the others until it became difficult to tell where one identity ended and the next began.
This is something I think about constantly in my own research: the more group memberships and identities someone shares with a source, the more credible that source can feel, regardless of whether the information holds up. When someone’s wellness influencer is also their fellow believer, fellow parent, fellow political ally, and fellow “truth-seeker,” that person’s claims may not get evaluated primarily on the evidence. They get evaluated through trust that was built somewhere else entirely.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Misguided: The Audio Edition — Introduction (Free Episode)
mercredi 24 juin 2026 • Durée 08:58
I’m launching Misguided: The Audio Edition right here on the newsletter. It’s a chapter-by-chapter audio companion to the book, with updated commentary on everything that’s happened since it went to press. Today, that series begins, and this first episode is free for everyone.
Before you hit play, let me tell you a little more about what this project actually is and why it exists.
Why this series
When my book Misguided came out in early 2025, one of the most common things people told me was that they wished there was an audio version. So did I. My publisher explored it but ultimately couldn’t make it work, so I decided to make it myself. And the more I worked on it, the more I realized this format has real advantages over a straight recording of the book.
Misguided can be dense in parts as I pack in a lot of social science research. That was intentional as I wanted every major claim backed by evidence, and I didn’t want to oversimplify. But that also means it can be a lot to absorb all of those scientific studies. This audio series gives you the core insights from each chapter in a focused, listenable form, without all the footnotes and detailed study breakdowns slowing things down. The nuances from the evidence-based insights are all still there, in the print and digital editions, if you want to go deeper. Think of this as the essential version, the ideas you should walk away with, presented as directly as I can manage.
And then there’s what I’m calling the author’s update.
Each episode has two parts. A summary of the chapter’s core research and arguments. And then my own unscripted commentary, where I go from “author presenting the book” to “author reflecting a year later.” This covers what I’d add now, what’s happened in the world since the book went to press, and how the science connects to the moment we’re actually living in.
That last part is where things get interesting, because the world has moved significantly in the year since I finalized the manuscript. The chapter on rebuilding trust in public health institutions reads very differently in 2026. So does the chapter on the future of AI and misinformation. And the chapter on how political identity shapes what we believe, well, the evidence keeps piling up.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
How Does Journalism Earn Trust?
mercredi 13 mai 2026 • Durée 41:53
In this episode of Misguided: The Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Patrick Johnson, a journalism scholar at Marquette University whose work focuses on news literacy, trust in journalism, and the relationship between media institutions and the communities they serve. Before entering academia, Patrick spent years teaching high school journalism, an experience that continues to shape how he thinks about journalism not simply as information delivery, but as a form of public education.
We begin by discussing why trust in journalism has become so fractured, and why treating distrust as a single problem misses the bigger picture. Patrick explains how different communities experience journalism differently, from conservatives who feel misrepresented to marginalized groups whose distrust is rooted in histories of exclusion or harm. Rather than reducing trust to a survey metric, he argues that rebuilding it requires deeper engagement with communities and a rethinking of journalism’s role in public life.
From there, we dig into Patrick’s research on what he calls metacognitive news literacy: the idea that journalists themselves must model transparency, reflection, and critical thinking if they want audiences to better understand how news is produced and evaluated. We also discuss the parallels between journalism and public health, why local news ecosystems matter so much, and how stronger relationships between institutions and communities can help rebuild trust.
We close on a more hopeful note, discussing why Patrick remains optimistic about the future of journalism despite the challenges it faces. His answer ultimately comes back to people, the journalists trying to improve their craft, the students shaping the future, and the possibility that institutions can still grow into something better.
You can listen to the full episode here or via the links below. As always, if you find my podcast useful or interesting, feel free to share it with someone who might also enjoy it.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became an American Evangelical Crisis
mardi 24 mars 2026 • Durée 41:47
In this episode of Misguided: The Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Jared Stacy, a theologian and former pastor who studies how conspiracy theories take root within evangelical communities. Jared completed his PhD in ethics at the University of Aberdeen and is the author of the new book Reality in Ruins, which examines how disinformation becomes uniquely resistant to correction when it gets woven into religious belief.
We start by talking about Jared’s concept of holy paranoia: the idea that conspiracy theory isn’t a bug in American evangelicalism but a feature. The core argument is that once conspiratorial thinking gets absorbed into a religious story, fact-checking alone can’t dislodge it. It’s not that people lack access to good information; it’s that the conspiracy has already been integrated into something that feels coherent, total, and true.
From there, we dig into the media ecosystems that make this possible — the radio networks, podcasts, and influencers that create a seamlessly reinforcing reality for many evangelical Christians, one where conservative political content and worship music flow together without friction or distinction.
We close by discussing what science communicators and public health professionals get wrong when trying to reach faith communities, and why Jared believes the most effective interventions will require theologians and scientists working together rather than talking past each other.
You can listen to the full episode here or via the links below. As always, if you find my podcast useful or interesting, feel free to share it with someone who might also enjoy it.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
The Hidden Social Forces Behind Misinformation
jeudi 26 février 2026 • Durée 43:42
In this episode of Misguided: The Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Cecilie Steenbuch-Traberg, a professor at the Copenhagen Business School who studies how social context shapes our susceptibility to misinformation, and what interventions actually work to counter it. Cecilie’s path into the field took a detour through marketing before she found her true passion: not trying to persuade people, but protecting them from being persuaded.
We start by talking about how the classic pre-bunking games (like Bad News and Harmony Square) hold up when you test them in more realistic social conditions. The short answer is that they mostly work, but people are still vulnerable to the surrounding social cues: who’s sharing something, how many likes it has, whether the source feels politically similar to you. Even a handful of comments can make a fringe belief feel like consensus. That gap between individual-level learning and real-world social context is where Cecilie sees the biggest unmet need.
From there, we dig into her new project, Solomon’s Secret: a murder mystery game designed to teach social influence literacy without ever announcing that it’s a misinformation game. The goal is to reach people who would never seek out a media literacy tool, by making the learning feel incidental to the fun. We also connect this to some of my own research comparing pre-bunking games across cultural contexts.
We close by discussing how AI is reshaping both the threat and the opportunity. AI can certainly be used as a tool for scaling manipulation, but it can also help personalize interventions in ways that weren’t previously possible.
You can listen to the full episode here or via the links below. As always, if you find it useful, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit from the conversation.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Why We Believe Misinformation and How We Can Protect Ourselves Against it
mardi 24 février 2026 • Durée 25:32
Here is my live video chat with Mike Nellis as a bonus podcast episode. I really enjoyed our conversation about the social psychology of why we believe false information, and how we can strengthen our media literacy through strategies like critical ignoring. We also discussed the broader structural and platform-level challenges that make today’s information environment so difficult to navigate.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit matthewfacciani.substack.com/subscribe
The Psychology of Virality in the Age of AI
mardi 20 janvier 2026 • Durée 01:15:48
In this episode of Misguided: The Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Steve Rathje, who is a social psychology postdoc at NYU, and a soon-to-be assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Steve’s work sits at the intersection of psychology, social media, and artificial intelligence. Steve studies how platform design, attention, and emerging technologies shape political polarization, belief formation, and online behavior.
We begin by talking about Steve’s non-traditional path into psychology, which started in theater before turning into a research career focused on how people think, feel, and behave online. From there, we dig into some of his most influential work on social media, including why posts that target political outgroups are often the most likely to go viral, and what that reveals about algorithms that reward outrage, mockery, and conflict.
We then explore more hopeful findings from Steve’s research on unfollowing hyper-partisan influencers, showing how small, targeted changes to people’s information diets can reduce out-party hostility over time without requiring users to leave social media altogether.
Finally, we turn to AI chatbots and Steve’s recent experiments on “sycophancy”—when AI systems become overly agreeable. We discuss how affirming chatbots can quietly increase belief certainty and extremity while still being perceived as warm, competent, and unbiased, and what this means for confirmation bias, persuasion, and the future design of AI systems.
You can listen to the full episode here or using the links below. As always, if you find it useful, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit from the conversation.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Foolproof: How to Build Resistance to Misinformation
jeudi 18 décembre 2025 • Durée 55:56
In this episode of Misguided: The Podcast, I’m joined by Sander van der Linden, who is a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge and one of the leading researchers studying misinformation, propaganda, and how people can build resistance to manipulation. If you’re familiar with the idea of “prebunking,” or psychological inoculation (training people to recognize misinformation before they encounter it), much of that work traces back to Sander’s research.
We begin by talking about his non-traditional path into psychology, from leaving a banking job to discovering research as a career, and how early experiences with being misled sparked a deeper interest in influence and propaganda. From there, we dig into what psychological inoculation actually is, why simply giving people facts often isn’t enough, and how tools like the Bad News game help people recognize manipulation techniques across political and cultural contexts.
We then zoom out to the broader information ecosystem, including the economics of fake social media accounts and how cheap it has become to spread inauthentic activity at scale, especially in an age of AI. Finally, we discuss what effective responses might look like, from education and platform responsibility to why Sander remains cautiously optimistic despite the very real challenges ahead.
You can listen to the full episode here or the links below. As always, if you find it useful, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit from the conversation.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Bespoke Realities, Invisible Rulers, and the Battle for Truth
lundi 24 novembre 2025 • Durée 43:13
In this episode of Misguided, I’m joined by Renee DiResta to talk about how she went from a winding career in tech, finance, and Silicon Valley startups to becoming one of the leading analysts of online influence. Renée traces the shift back to a personal moment: after having her first child in 2013, she noticed a concerning amount of anti-vaccine content across Facebook communities. She started quietly studying those communities and doing network analysis at night, work that eventually became her full-time focus.
We spend a lot of time on a core idea from her book Invisible Rulers “bespoke realities.” Renée argues that blaming everything on “the algorithm” misses what truly pulls people into false worlds. Algorithms may guide people toward certain groups, but it’s the communities themselves—identity, belonging, alternative experts, and self-contained information loops—that keep people inside and make outside institutions seem corrupt or irrelevant.
From there, we turn to AI. Renée sees chatbots and answer engines as the next major force in shaping reality. As more people skip searching and instead ask a preferred bot for the truth, the information battle moves upstream to the training and reference layer of the internet (especially Wikipedia). Influence those sources, and you can influence what AI confidently repeats back.
Finally, we talk about why scientific and medical institutions keep losing ground online. They’re limited by incentives, risk-averse cultures, and a decade-long “network debt” compared to misinformation influencers. Renée’s conclusion is direct: if institutions want to stay relevant, they need to show up where people actually are, build genuine relationships in communities, and treat communication as central to their mission, not a side task or liability.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
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Découvrez des podcasts liées à Misguided: The Podcast. Explorez des podcasts avec des thèmes, sujets, et formats similaires. Ces similarités sont calculées grâce à des données tangibles, pas d'extrapolations !
Andrea has watched people find their way out of these belief systems, but never because of one perfect debate or viral debunking. It’s slower than that: a stray thought that doesn’t sit right, a small inconsistency someone can’t shake, or a person outside the echo chamber they still trust enough to hear out.
She called it being a “pebble in someone’s shoe.” Not an immediate conversion moment, just enough friction that, months or years later, it adds up or makes someone more open to listening to new perspectives.
That’s a harder story to tell than the one the wellness world tells. Conspiracy narratives are simple, emotionally satisfying, and built for social media. “Eat well, move your body, sleep enough, and be patient” is true, but it doesn’t sell nearly as well.
I really enjoyed this episode, and I think it provides a great overview of the wellness world while also showing how our identities and belief systems influence what we trust.
You can listen to the full episode here or via the links below. As always, if you find my podcast useful or interesting, feel free to share it with someone who might also enjoy it.
The book came out about a year ago. I think it’s more relevant now than when I wrote it.
What’s coming in the series
Here’s the full lineup. Each episode covers one chapter, with a summary of the key research and my updated commentary.
This first episode is free for everyone. Episodes 2–8 are for paid subscribers only. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is a good moment to try the format before you decide.
This episode is also available on the Misguided podcast, so if you’re a longtime podcast listener, you’ll find it there automatically. Future episodes in the series will be for paid Substack subscribers only and won’t appear in the public podcast feed.
Episode 1 — Introduction(free)What is the scope of this book, and why did a sociologist who started in neuroscience end up studying misinformation?
Episode 2 — The Scope and Consequences of MisinformationHow widespread is it, how can we measure it, and what does it actually cost us?
Episode 3 — How Our Identities Make Us VulnerableWhat is the psychology behind why we reject facts, and what can actually help?
Episode 4 — COVID, Politics, and Talking Across the DivideHow did a virus become partisan, and what does the evidence say about having difficult conversations across that divide?
Episode 5 — How Social Networks Spread MisinformationWho we know shapes what we believe, but how exactly, and what can help?
Episode 6 — Vaccine Misinformation and Rebuilding TrustHow does the anti-vaccine movement work, and can institutions earn trust back?
Episode 7 — Media Literacy, Critical Ignoring, and PrebunkingWhat education actually works, and what’s just wishful thinking?
Episode 8 — The Future of Misinformation, RevisitedI wrote this chapter during the AI explosion. One year in: what did I get right, what did I miss, and where is this all heading now?
Episodes will drop roughly weekly.
A personal note before you listen
I submitted the last major revisions of Misguided on January 15th, 2025. About a week later, I received an email telling me my position at Notre Dame had been eliminated. The grant funding it had been cut for not aligning with the new administration’s priorities. The goal of that grant was simply to advance media literacy in the US, and in Southeast Asia, which is under-researched in this space. I was working on tools to help people recognize AI-generated video and understand why they trust information from chatbots. Nothing partisan. None of it mattered.
It was a difficult period. Science and health funding was being cut broadly, misinformation research specifically was under attack, and finding a new position in that environment was genuinely hard. I cobbled things together: adjuncting, consulting, growing this newsletter and podcast, searching for funding for the science communication nonprofit I work with, The Evidence Collective. I also landed a research contract with Georgetown, as part of the Lancet Commission on health, faith, and trust, which I’ll talk more about when we get to the chapters on vaccines and institutional trust.
Eventually, I found a wonderful new job at the Yale School of Public Health, where I study how and why people trust health information, and help run science communication training on campus. It’s a great fit and opportunity.
I share all of this because it’s part of the story of why this series exists, and because it connects directly to what the book is about: the structural forces that shape what we know and what we’re allowed to say. The same year my book about misinformation went to press, misinformation research in the United States was severely defunded. While my book focuses on the social psychology of why we believe falsehoods, I also cover some structural issues, and the updated commentary of each chapter allows me to spend a little more time on that level as well.
