“We all have a tendency to believe things we’d like to believe are true,” says Brendan Nyhan, assistant professor of government and contributor to The New York Times policy and politics blog, “The Upshot.” Nyhan, who studies political misinformation and the politics of scandal, has examined topics ranging from pediatrics to politics and vaccination to voting. His writing has earned him widespread acclaim—Politico called him “one of the most thought-provoking writers about politics on the web,” and The Huffington Post dubbed him a “political science Shaolin warrior.”

 “Misperceptions have become one of the most common themes of my research,” he says. “I am interested in the root of myth misconception.”

As an academic researcher and columnist studying scandal and misinformation, Nyhan has a lot of material to work with. “It’s incredible that with all of the open information access of today, you still hear and read things that are not supported by evidence,” Nyhan says. “Being the information exposer can be a fun role to play.”

Recently Nyhan has been writing extensively about the 2016 presidential election—a recent “Upshot” column asked whether Hillary Clinton was “likable” enough. Another column, “Here’s How to Avoid Getting Fooled on Election Night,” advises readers on how to interpret (and ignore) polls like a pro—Nyhan warns that polls are important, but “for political mavens they’re also an amusing way to follow the horse race.” He suggests, for example, that a candidate’s endorsements by party elites “are better predictors than polls of who will win the presidential nomination”—think Donald Trump’s high poll ratings and media attention, but unlikelihood of becoming the next president of the United States. “He’s hardly,” as Nyhan writes, “a top-tier candidate.”

Nyhan began researching political misinformation and scandal as a political science graduate student at Duke. “I had a professor who was saying ‘scandals are found.’ That made me wonder, ‘How do we know they aren’t just made?’ ” Before coming to Dartmouth in 2011, he cofounded spinsanity.org—a nonpartisan watchdog blog “dedicated to unspinning misleading claims from politicians, pundits and the press,” according to the website—and authored the bestseller All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth. For two years he was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. Since coming to Hanover he has also worked as a media critic for the Columbia Journalism Review.  

Nyhan teaches courses on political misinformation, conspiracy theories and quantitative political analysis. He also teaches a course on the presidency. “The course is a chance to share what we know about it,” he says. “Which is surprisingly little.” This is because, he says, with a small sample size of only 44 presidents, it’s hard to statistically determine the impact of presidents’ decisions. “The best evidence we have suggests that the effects of the president on public opinion and Congress are often vastly overstated in the press, but we’re limited in how much we can know by the available data,” he says.

Between teaching, publishing regularly in academic and media forums and staying on top of his own blog and social media feeds—he has more than 10,500 Twitter followers—Nyhan stays busy. How does he juggle it all? 

“I do drink a lot of coffee,” he says, laughing. “I value efficiency. Practice has helped. But also, I work hard.”

He finds synergies between his many projects. “I like the way my public work feeds back into my academic work,” he says. “I might read something in the news that’s relevant to my research, tweet about it and then eventually use it as the idea for an ‘Upshot’ column.” 

Nyhan’s academic interests fuel much of his public writing, and the writing feeds back into his research. “Academic writing is often impenetrable by non-experts. Academics often make the mistake of talking down to people. We aren’t communicating effectively enough,” he says. “The response to my public work is a great example that non-experts can ask really good questions. Non-experts question the assumption of experts, and questioning assumptions is what my work is all about.” 

Nyhan’s research is relevant beyond politics. “The refusal of large numbers of people to get immunized affects all of us,” says fellow government professor John Carey. “Nyhan’s work might help us to understand what kind of public health campaigns can combat anti-vaccine beliefs, as well as helping us understand the dynamics of political campaigns better. It’s a rare thing for research in political science to have that kind of impact outside our own field.”

Carey praises Nyhan for not just his research, but also the way he presents it. “Nyhan’s work has the kind of reach it does because he’s not just a creative and careful scholar, he’s also a good writer,” Carey says. Nyhan emphasizes that writing is one of the most valuable skills any student can develop. “It’s an art to express yourself clearly,” he says. “The skill of writing is so important in the world.”

And learning about the world—questioning our assumptions about the world—is something Nyhan pushes students to do as well. As Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”                     

Rianna P. Starheim, a former DAM intern, is a freelance writer based in India.