Failure to accept retractions: A contribution to the continued influence effect

Abstract

Previous research has shown that when information about a narrative event is retracted, people continue to use that information even though it has been explicitly identified as incorrect. Not only can this occur for implicitly inferred information, but also when the change is stated explicitly. The current study explored whether this effect reflects, at least in part, an unwillingness of some readers to accept changes to their understanding. Experiment 1 assessed this using a continued influence effect paradigm with an additional probe asking whether participants believed the explicitly stated change. Most did not. Those that did accept it showed evidence of a reduced use of the incorrect information, while those that did not accept it performed similarly to those who received no correction (control). Experiment 2 included an additional explicit instruction that participants could say "don't know" if they were unsure of how to respond. The pattern of results was largely the same as for Experiment 1. Experiment 3 modified the alternative account to increase plausibility, and added two additional stories/question sets to ensure effects were not limited to one set of materials. A greater number of participants found the retractions believable than in Experiments 1 and 2. Nonetheless, a similar pattern of results was found. Overall, these findings suggest that at least some of the evidence for the continued use of retracted information may be due to some people not accepting the retraction, even in the absence of external motivation to disregard it.

Can you believe it? An investigation into the impact of retraction source credibility on the continued influence effect

“…An effect of perceived trustworthiness meshes well with the evidence provided by both experiments that retraction belief is an important determinant of post-retraction misinformation reliance and thus the CIE. Our results are consistent with the suggestion that people may continue to rely on retracted misinformation partly because they do not believe the retraction (see Guillory & Geraci, 2010;O'Rear & Radvansky, 2020): Across all conditions, belief in the retraction was significantly lower than belief in the original erroneous information, suggesting people considered the misinformation more likely to be true than the correction. It is not entirely clear why this effect was observed, especially as the misinformation was not linked to any source, meaning that readers seem to have simply inferred that the source was credible; the differential evaluation may have resulted from the brevity of the retractions, or from the fact that a retractionunlike the initial critical informationis generally processed in light of its contradiction with the earlier information and is thus subject to immediate scrutiny.…”

Can You Believe it? An Investigation into the Impact of Retraction Source Credibility on the Continued Influence Effect

“…An effect of perceived trustworthiness meshes well with the evidence provided by both experiments that retraction belief is an important determinant of post-retraction misinformation reliance and thus the CIE. Our results are consistent with the suggestion that people may continue to rely on retracted misinformation partly because they do not believe the retraction (see Guillory & Geraci, 2010;O'Rear & Radvansky, 2020): Across all conditions, belief in the retraction was significantly lower than belief in the original erroneous information, suggesting people considered the misinformation more likely to be true than the correction. It is not entirely clear why this effect was observed; it may have resulted from the brevity of the retractions, or from the fact that a retraction-unlike the initial critical information-is generally processed in light of its contradiction with the earlier information and is thus subject to immediate scrutiny.…”

Timing matters when correcting fake news

“…These results provide insight into the continued influence effect. If misinformation persists because people refuse to “update” beliefs initially ( 16 ), prebunking should outperform debunking; readers know from the outset that news is false, so no updating is needed. We found the opposite pattern, which instead supports the concurrent storage hypothesis that people retain both misinformation and its correction ( 17 ); but over time, the correction fades from memory (e.g., ref.…”