Rolling Myth Lab

Principal investigator – Klara Austeja Buczel

Co-workers – Adam Siwiak

The continued influence effect of misinformation (CIE) refers to the situations when people continue to rely on information that is initially presented as true but is then retracted and revealed to be false. One of the techniques that can be used in counteracting CIE is to explicitly warn people that there is a possibility that they might have been misled. However, while the effects of various kinds of warnings have been extensively researched in different misinformation procedures (such as post-event misinformation effect (PEM), fake news, or DRM), little is known about warnings' effectiveness on CIE, especially considering the standard “narrative” paradigm. In only one paper on this topic, Ecker et al. (2010) presented two experiments, from which it follows that misinformation reliance can be reduced if one is explicitly forewarned about the misinformation (i.e. warned before the presentation of misinformation), and it can be reduced even further if the forewarning is additionally provided with an alternative to the misinformation.

As can be seen, Ecker et al. (2010) explored only forewarnings and did not compare their effectiveness to post-warnings (i.e. warnings after the presentation of misinformation). This has still not been done in any other study, so it remains unknown to what extent post-warnings affect retractions, if at all.

In this project, various types of warnings are being explored. We were especially interested in comparing the effectiveness of forewarnings and post-warnings in CIE procedure, but also in inoculation effectiveness. The results would be interesting for theoretical reasons. One theory explaining the mechanism of warning effectiveness in CIE procedure states that pre-exposure warnings actively suppress the automatic activation of misinformation and support strategic processes in retrieving the retraction. It was also argued that the effectiveness of warnings that are given after the misinformation is encoded supports the selective retrieval dual-process view because they aid the strategic monitoring processes that are used to assess the validity of automatically retrieved misinformation. However, this statement needs more support, as post-warnings (i.e., after misinformation is encoded) have not yet been used in the CIE paradigm. The separation of forewarning and post-warning is important as these warnings’ mechanisms may be different: forewarning may affect both encoding and retrieval efficiency, but post-warning may affect only the retrieval process. On the other hand, inoculation effectiveness would suggest that one of the mechanisms behind CIE could be some kind of persuastion or social influence.

Apart from theoretical reasons, from the applied perspective there is a reason why post-warnings may be a better solution than forewarnings: warning about specific misinformation before its occurrence is not a viable solution under real-world conditions. Thus, while simple debunking (i.e., retraction) is not sufficient in reducing misinformation reliance (which is CIE itself), it is worth exploring whether more viable and applicable post-warnings might enhance such debunking. Also, exploring inoculation effectiveness is important, as inoculation is considered to be effective technique in countering misinformation in real world context.

Buczel, K. A., Siwiak, A., Kękuś, M., & Szpitalak, M. (2024). Do the protective effects last? The effectiveness of alternative + forewarning/inoculation technique in reducing misinformation reliance and reliance regression in the continued influence effect procedure. Open Science Framework repository. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/hs2yb

Buczel, K. A., Siwiak, A., Szpitalak, M., & Polczyk, R. (2024). How do forewarnings and post-warnings affect misinformation reliance? The impact of warnings on the continued influence effect and belief regression. Memory & Cognition, 52, 1048–1064. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-024-01520-z

Buczel, K. A., Szyszka, P. D., Siwiak, A., Szpitalak, M., & Polczyk, R. (2022). Vaccination against misinformation: The inoculation technique reduces the continued influence effect. PLOS ONE, 17(4): e0267463. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267463

Buczel, K. A., Siwiak, A., Szpitalak, M., & Polczyk, R. (september, 2022). Czy jesteśmy w stanie przeciwdziałać dezinformacji? Rola ostrzeżeń, ich umiejscowienia oraz trwałość wraz z upływem czasu. Conference: XVII Zjazd Polskiego Stowarzyszenia Psychologii Społecznej. Gdańsk, Poland.

Publications from the project

Social Media

2024 © Rolling Myth Lab       |       Design by Klara Austeja Buczel

Rolling Myth Lab