Evaluating suggestibility to additive and contradictory misinformation following explicit error detection in younger and older adults.

Abstract

In 2 experiments, we assessed age-related suggestibility to additive and contradictory misinformation (i.e., remembering of false details from an external source). After reading a fictional story, participants answered questions containing misleading details that were either additive (misleading details that supplemented an original event) or contradictory (errors that changed original details). On a final test, suggestibility was greater for additive than contradictory misinformation, and older adults endorsed fewer false contradictory details than younger adults. To mitigate suggestibility in Experiment 2, participants were warned about potential errors, instructed to detect errors, or instructed to detect errors after exposure to examples of additive and contradictory details. Again, suggestibility to additive misinformation was greater than contradictory, and older adults endorsed less contradictory misinformation. Only after detection instructions with misinformation examples were younger adults able to reduce contradictory misinformation effects and reduced these effects to the level of older adults. Additive misinformation however, was immune to all warning and detection instructions. Thus, older adults were less susceptible to contradictory misinformation errors, and younger adults could match this misinformation rate when warning/detection instructions were strong. (PsycINFO Database Record

Reducing suggestibility to additive versus contradictory misinformation in younger and older adults via divided attention and/or explicit error detection

“…At exposure, for contradictory misinformation, detection may require fewer attentional resources because discrepancies (vs. a lack of a detail) are more distinctive (Moore & Lampinen, ; Putnam et al, ). Consistent with this possibility, Huff and Umanath () showed that older adults, who often show breakdowns in attentional control (Craik & Anderson, ), were just as good at detecting errors as younger adults. Moreover, older adults were more successful at later rejecting contradictory misinformation than were younger adults.…”

“…The misinformation paradigm can be deconstructed into three steps designed to echo real‐world experiences of events and subsequent exposure to errors. Participants are first exposed to an original event, often presented in videos (e.g., Takarangi, Parker, & Garry, ), slides (e.g., Loftus, Miller, & Burns, ), or a narrative (e.g., Huff & Umanath, ). Second, participants are exposed to misleading details about the original event, via narratives (e.g., Okado & Stark, ; Takarangi et al, ), photographs (e.g., Loftus et al, ), postevent interviews (e.g., Mueller‐Johnson & Ceci, ), or even social others (e.g., Roediger, Meade, & Bergman, ).…”

“…Prior research has examined qualitative characteristics of misleading content that can influence subsequent suggestibility, such as how central versus peripheral the misleading details are to the original event (Luna & Migueles, ; Wilford, Chan, & Tuhn, ; Wright & Stroud, ). Here, we also examine qualitative characteristics of misleading items by contrasting two types of misinformation that have been studied less frequently (Frost, ; Huff & Umanath, ; Moore & Lampinen, ; Nemeth & Belli, ): contradictory and additive. Contradictory misinformation refers to suggested misleading details that are discrepant with specific details that were originally presented (e.g., the stop/yield sign discrepancy in the classic misinformation paradigm).…”

“…Until recently (Huff & Umanath, ; Moore & Lampinen, ), differences between contradictory and additive misinformation had not been systematically compared despite both types producing large misinformation effects (Frost, ; Nemeth & Belli, ; Saunders & Jess, ). Huff and Umanath () presented younger and older adults with a fictional story followed by misleading questions that contained additive and contradictory details that were systematically counterbalanced across misinformation type and participants. Additive misinformation was falsely recognized as being in the original narrative at a much higher rate than contradictory misinformation across age groups (see also, Moore & Lampinen, ), but interestingly, older adults were less susceptible to contradictory misinformation than were younger adults.…”

“…However, such detection may occur at two different points—during the misinformation exposure phase, the final test phase, or both. Interestingly, Huff and Umanath () observed that successful detection of additive misinformation was equivalent to that of contradictory misinformation despite subsequent elevated rates of additive misinformation endorsement on the final test. However, detecting additive and contradictory errors may hinge on very different processes both at exposure and at retrieval due to the basic nature of the error types—one, a novel detail and, another, a changed detail.…”