Full Disclosure: Disclosure Might Not Work

Putting a note at the end of a blog post explaining the author’s ties to the subject is becoming the most popular solution to journalism’s conflict of interest problems.

But a new behavioral economics study shows that the “solution” may actually be part of the problem.

“None of us are saying that transparency is a bad thing,” Daylian Cain, a behavioral economist at Yale University, told the Boston Globe. “But almost always, it fails to work as well as we think it does.”

The first study asked people to serve as experts giving other study participants advice on how to estimate the price of a house.

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