Argument Availability as a Mediator of Social Theory Perseverance

Anderson, Craig A.; New, Boris; Speer, James

doi:10.1521/soco.1985.3.3.235

Cited by 58 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…However, research in psychology suggests that discarding false information may not be so simple. People who form an attitude based on a particular piece of evidence tend to retain at least some of that attitude even when the evidence is proven false (Anderson, Lepper, & Ross 1980;Anderson, New, & Speer 1985;Johnson & Seifert 1994).…”

Section: Lingering Effects Of Misinformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Belief Echoes: The Persistent Effects of Corrected Misinformation

Thorson

2015

Political Communication

455

304

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The omnipresence of political misinformation in the today's media environment raises serious concerns about citizens' ability make fully informed decisions. In response to these concerns, the last few years have seen a renewed commitment to journalistic and institutional fact-checking. The assumption of these efforts is that successfully correcting misinformation will prevent it from affecting citizens' attitudes. However, through a series of experiments, I find that exposure to a piece of negative political information persists in shaping attitudes even after the information has been successfully discredited. A correction--even when it is fully believed--does not eliminate the effects of misinformation on attitudes. These lingering attitudinal effects, which I call "belief echoes," are created even when the misinformation is corrected immediately, arguably the gold standard of journalistic fact-checking.Belief echoes can be affective or cognitive. Affective belief echoes are created through a largely unconscious process in which a piece of negative information has a stronger impact on evaluations than does its correction. Cognitive belief echoes, on the other hand, are created through a conscious cognitive process during which a person recognizes that a particular negative claim about a candidate is false, but reasons that its presence increases the likelihood of other negative information being true. Experimental results suggest that while affective belief echoes are created across party lines, cognitive belief echoes are more likely when a piece of misinformation reinforces a person's pre-existing political views.The existence of belief echoes provide an enormous incentive for politicians to strategically spread false information with the goal of shaping public opinion on key issues. However, results from two more experiments show that politicians also suffer consequences for making false claims, an encouraging finding that has the potential to constrain the behavior of politicians presented with the opportunity to strategically create belief echoes. While the existence of belief echoes may also provide a disincentive for the media to engage in serious fact-checking, evidence also suggests that such efforts can also have positive consequences by increasing citizens' trust in media. Degree Type DissertationDegree Name

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Section: Lingering Effects Of Misinformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One explanation for this effect is that exposure to the initial results caused subjects to think about the possible reasons for the negative or positive scores (Anderson, New, & Speer 1985). When the scores were discredited, the reasons remained.…”

Section: Belief Perseverance and Mental Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Belief Echoes: The Persistent Effects of Corrected Misinformation

Thorson

2015

Political Communication

455

304

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“…Other research has shown that causal links between events are quite strong, resistant to change, and frequently used in judging the relatedness of events (C. A. Anderson, New, & Speer, 1985;C. A. Anderson & Sechler, 1986;Pennington & Hastie, 1986;Read, 1987;Tversky & Kahneman, 1982).…”

Section: On the Structure Of Person Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking about people: Contributions of a typological alternative to associationistic and dimensional models of person perception.

Anderson

Sedikides²

1991

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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The associationistic view of person perception states that people are perceived in terms of trait covariations. The dimensional view maintains that others are perceived by means of a limited number of dimensions. In contrast, the typological view is that others are perceived in terms of person types, and traits within a given person type have a unique interactive relation. In Experiment l, associationistic, dimensional, and typological representations of implicit personality theories were empirically derived. The derived stimuli were used in Experiment 2, which examined the effects of person type membership on impression priming and perceived trait belongingness, controlling for associationistic and dimensional factors. As expected, results validated the unique contribution of a typological approach to person perception. Implications of the present findings for the implicit personality theory, stereotype, and person memory literatures are discussed. People constitute important categories of objects. It is of no surprise, then, that thinking about people is such a pervasive phenomenon. We routinely form impressions of other people's personalities, make predictions about their behavior, wonder about their intentions, and evaluate their performance outcomes. In this article, we are concerned with the issue of how we think about, perceive, or cognitively represent other people. How Do People Think About People? There are at least three general views that speak to this issue: The associationistic, the dimensional, and the typological view. i Associationistic and Dimensional Views The simplest view, the associationistic, is that people think about others in terms of trait covariations. Expectations about a target person's standing on some unknown trait (e.g., shyness) are derived from beliefs about the correlations of that trait with known traits (e.g., outgoingness, aloofness). More formally, Trait A is expected to accurately describe a person who has Traits B, C, and D to the extent that A is believed to correlate positively with B, C, and D. The expectation for a given unknown trait depends on the perceived relations between that trait and all We thank the participants in the Nags Head Conference on Social Cognition, especially Dave Schneider, for their helpful suggestions. We also thank Rob Nosofsky and the anonymous reviewers for their perceptive comments on drafts of this article and Phil Wood for his expert advice on multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. The help of Mary Finch, Deborah Weaver, and Lee Metzler in conducting this research is gratefully acknowledged.

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“…A mistake in judging the intentions of a world leader can have catastrophic results to nations (e.g., war), whereas a mistake in judging the social job candidates has a rather modest impact to a limited num ber of people. Nonetheless, research from a variety of areas converges on the similarity of judgment processes across domains (e.g., Anderson, New, & Spear, 1985;Anderson & Weiner, in press;Black, Galambos, & Read, 1984;Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982;Kruglanski, 1989;Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Specifically, it appears that causal inferences about another person are frequently based on causal knowledge structures.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%