Another concern is that people may respond to fact-checks in a biased fashion. My research has repeatedly found that we often resist corrective information that contradicts our political predispositions about controversial issues. The people who seek out specialized political coverage also tend to have strong views about politics and to be politically sophisticated, which can make them more prone to interpreting arguments and information in a manner that reinforces their existing views.

In a report that was released Wednesday by the American Press Institute, Jason Reifler, a senior lecturer of politics at the University of Exeter in Britain, and I show that these fears are at least partly unfounded. Our study provides the first experimental evidence that long-term exposure to fact-checks can improve political knowledge.

Our study randomly assigned one group within a nationally representative sample of survey respondents to read a series of PolitiFact fact-checks three times between late September 2014 and Election Day. Others read a series of nonpolitical news releases. We then assessed how much people learned from the fact-checks using a series of knowledge questions administered in the period immediately after the election — days or weeks after they were shown the article in question.

Exposing people to fact-checks increased the accuracy of participants’ responses to knowledge questions by 9 percentage points (from 16 percent to 25 percent), a result that was somewhat higher among more politically knowledgeable respondents. We did not find consistent evidence that people were more likely to learn facts that were in line with their predispositions (for example, a Democrat learning that a claim made by a Republican official is false).