How America Lost its Mind: Our Misinformation Crisis

Since the 1980s, Americans’ misinformation levels have steady increased, and are now at a crisis level. Misinformation fueled the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol building and has contributed to the unnecessary death of thousands of Americans from COVID-19. How could this happen? How could one of the world’s most educated publics lose touch so completely with reality? Answers can be found in the extreme polarization that has invaded our party politics; changes in the media that have diminished the influence of reliable sources and heightened that of sources which traffic in half-truths, deceptions, and outright lies; and the ways that our minds work, particularly our tendency to believe what we’d like to believe even in the face of conflicting evidence.

Dr. Thomas E. Patterson is the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Dr. Patterson is the author of the recently published How America Lost Its Mind, which looks at the problem of misinformation. His other books include Out of Order, which examined the media’s political role and received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. Dr. Patterson’s first book, The Unseeing Eye, which looked at television’s impact on politics and was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the leading books on public opinion of the past half century.
A Minnesota native, he earned his PhD at the University of Minnesota, where he studied after serving in the U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam.