falsecognition

Falsecognition is a term used to describe the state or process of holding beliefs, judgments, or perceptions that are inaccurate relative to available evidence. It is related to, but not limited to, false memory or misinformation, and it emphasizes the cognitive occurrence of incorrect knowledge rather than deliberate deception. Falsecognition can refer to incorrect factual beliefs, mistaken causes or outcomes, or unjustified confidence in false conclusions.

Causes of falsecognition include memory distortions (such as misattribution or the misinformation effect), failures in source monitoring, overreliance on intuition or heuristics, and metacognitive errors that produce an illusory sense of understanding or knowing. Social and information environments can amplify falsecognition through misinformation, framing effects, social proof, or echo chambers.

Examples include confidently asserting a wrong statistic after encountering a misleading headline, recalling an event that did not occur, attributing causal power to a spurious correlation, or feeling a high level of understanding about a topic while possessing only superficial knowledge.

Measurement approaches often involve confidence judgments, epistemic feelings such as the sense of knowing, and tasks that compare accuracy with confidence. Falsecognition has implications for everyday decision making, education, and public discourse, and it can contribute to the spread of misinformation if not mitigated.

Related concepts include false memory, illusion of knowledge, cognitive biases, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and the misinformation effect. Some scholars regard falsecognition as an informal umbrella term for a cluster of misbeliefs and cognitive errors rather than a single discrete category.