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There are a lot of studies on this topic but we don't take the trouble to read them preferring the comfort of the opinions we hold which are consistent with what we think we know.,

No need to plow through papers on information war, the exploitation of cognitive biases - here's summary from the horse's mouth:

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

The corruption reached its apogee in 1893, when control of the state legislature was purchased openly, as at a cattle auction, by Senator Thomas Martin. Martin had long been the lawyer for the Morgan-Behnont interests in Virginia, and represented their substantial railroad holdings, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and the Norfolk and Western Railway. Congressional testimony showed that J. P. Morgan and Kuhn Loeb Co. between them controlled ninety-two per cent of all the railroad mileage in the United States. Both of them were fronts for the Rothschild interests. The funds advanced for that purpose by the Morgan-Behnont interests (Behnont was the Rothschild's authorized representative in the United States) were used by Martin in 1893 to buy nine members of the legislature for $1,000 each; this gave him complete control of that body. His assistant in this bribery was William A. Glasgow, Jr., the chief counsel for the Norfolk and Western Railway. Martin's chief ally in controlling the state legislature was his able assistant, Senator Hal Flood, grandfather of Senator Byrd.

unverified – from Eustis Mullins