On social media and in everyday life, people are often exposed to misinformation. Decades of research have shown that exposure to misinformation can have significant impacts on people's thoughts, actions, and memories. During global pandemics like COVID‐19, people are likely exposed to heightened quantities of misinformation as they search for and are exposed to copious amounts of information about the disease and its effects. This media environment, with an abundance of both accurate and inaccurate information, is often called an “infodemic.” In the current essay, we discuss the consequences of exposure to misinformation during this infodemic, particularly in the domain of memory. We review existing research demonstrating how inaccurate, postevent information impacts a person's memory for a previously witnessed event. We discuss various factors that strengthen the impact of misinformation, including repetition and whether the misinformation is consistent with people's pre‐existing attitudes or beliefs. We conclude by describing how social media companies and individual users can help prevent the spread of misinformation and the ways in which cognitive science research can inform these approaches.
Choice blindness refers to the finding that people can often be misled about their own self-reported choices. However, little research has investigated the more long-term effects of choice blindness. We examined whether people would detect alterations to their own memory reports, and whether such alterations could influence participants' memories. Participants viewed slideshows depicting crimes, and then either reported their memories for episodic details of the event (Exp. 1) or identified a suspect from a lineup (Exp. 2). Then we exposed participants to manipulated versions of their memory reports, and later tested their memories a second time. The results indicated that the majority of participants failed to detect the misinformation, and that exposing witnesses to misleading versions of their own memory reports caused their memories to change to be consistent with those reports. These experiments have implications for eyewitness memory.
Summary After making a lineup identification, eyewitnesses remember being more confident in their identification and having a better view of the initial crime if they are told they correctly identified the suspect compared to witnesses not given this feedback. The present studies investigated whether this effect of feedback occurs similarly when witnesses report their confidence numerically and when they report their confidence in their own words. Across three studies, participants (N = 1396) watched a mock crime video, received either confirmatory feedback or not, and reported their confidence in words, numbers, or both words and numbers. Results showed a significant effect of feedback on both confidence and witnessed experience in all confidence conditions. This effect occurred with both biased and unbiased lineup instructions and with both target‐present and target‐absent lineups. The results advance discussions about the best means for reporting confidence in the field.
The current research investigated the mechanisms by which perceptions of confession evidence both influence and are influenced by perceptions of other case evidence using the theoretical framework of coherence-based reasoning (CBR). CBR posits that ambiguity and uncertainty are eschewed by artificially imposing consistency between pieces of evidence through bidirectional reasoning: Inferences about evidence lead to a preferred verdict, which in turn radiates backward to influence the perception of evidence. Two studies tested the CBR account with regard to confessions. An online sample of participants evaluated confession and nonconfession evidence at pretest and posttest. Study 1 revealed that, during pretest, participants (N = 119) deemed the evidence independent and nonprobative and the confession to be voluntary. However, at posttest, in the context of a criminal trial, participants considered the same evidence interrelated and highly inculpatory or exculpatory, depending on their verdict. Moreover, participants who voted to convict deemed the confession substantially voluntary, whereas participants who voted to acquit deemed it involuntary. Study 2 experimentally manipulated the strength of the nonconfession evidence in an effort to push participants (N = 127) toward a particular verdict. The same patterns of results emerged but were conditional on the strength of the nonconfession evidence: Strong case evidence caused the confession to be perceived as more voluntary, despite the fact that the confession was held constant. These findings replicate the coherence effect in a new domain and suggest that judges conducting harmless error analysis or making admissibility decisions might underappreciate the impact of confession evidence on jurors' verdicts. (PsycINFO Database Record
After participating in an experiment, people are routinely debriefed. How effective is debriefing when the experiments involve deception, as occurs in studies of misinformation and memory? We conducted two studies addressing this question. In Study 1, participants (N = 373) watched a video, were exposed to misinformation or not, and completed a memory test. Participants were either debriefed or not and then were interviewed approximately one week later. Results revealed that, after debriefing, some participants continued to endorse misinformation. Notably, however, debriefing had positive effects; participants exposed to misinformation reported learning significantly more from their study participation than control participants. In Study 2 (N = 439), we developed and tested a novel, enhanced debriefing. The enhanced debriefing included more information about the presence of misinformation in the study and how memory errors occur. This enhanced debriefing outperformed typical debriefing. Specifically, when the enhanced debriefing explicitly named and described the misinformation, the misinformation effect postdebriefing was eliminated. Enhanced debriefing also resulted in a more positive participant experience than typical debriefing. These results have implications for the design and use of debriefing in deception studies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.