Misleading Health Consumers Through Violations of Communicative Norms: A Case Study of Online Diabetes Education

Abstract

Communication is a cooperative endeavor that goes well beyond decoding sentences' literal meaning. Listeners actively construe the meaning of utterances from both their literal meanings and the pragmatic principles that govern communication. When communicators make pragmatically infelicitous statements, the effects can be similar to paltering-misleading speech that evokes false inferences from true statements. The American Diabetes Association's (ADA's) "Diabetes Myths" website provides a real-world case study in such misleading communications. Calling something a myth implies that it is clearly false. Instead, the ADA's "myths" are false only because of some technicality or uncharitable reading. We compared participants' baseline knowledge of diabetes with that of participants who read either the ADA's myths or the myths rewritten as questions that do not presuppose the statement is false. As predicted, exposure to the ADA's "myths," but not to the rephrased questions, reduced basic knowledge of diabetes. Our findings underscore the need to consider psycholinguistic principles in mass communications.

When intents to educate can misinform: Inadvertent paltering through violations of communicative norms

“…This content is prominently displayed on the site and has also been linked, reproduced, or paraphrased on many other prominent health websites. In contrast to the other instances of paltering we have discussed, like Powell et al [12], we do not believe that the ADA was trying to be misleading, but most likely meant to provide constructive information and advice.…”

“…Our present study focuses on how these same kinds of paltering techniques might be accomplished inadvertently if speakers do not take care to respect Gricean principles of communication. In a recent case study, Powell et al [12] found that the American Diabetes Association's website inadvertently paltered by presenting an infelicitous list of myths about diabetes, likely misleading health consumers. The American Diabetes Association website is a highly reputable and visible source for diabetes information [17].…”

Refuting Spurious COVID-19 Treatment Claims Reduces Demand and Misinformation Sharing

“…Potentially related to this, we also did not find a reliable willingness-topay difference between misinformation and control conditions. However, consistent with effects of implied and subtle misinformation (e.g., Ecker, Lewandowsky, Chang, & Pillai, 2014;Powell, Keil, Brenner, Lim, & Markman, 2018;Rich & Zaragoza, 2016), this may have also been driven by the insinuation in the control article that vitamins can provide some infection protection. This suggests that the framing of "neutral" educational communications by impartial media sources needs to be carefully considered.…”

State of the Science: A Scoping Review and Gap Analysis of Diabetes Online Communities

“…While we did not explore the interaction between HCPs and PWD, research suggests HCP-patient interaction on social media is an effective and naturally cost-effective intervention to promote health. 84…”