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A theoretical review of the misinformation effect: Predictions from an activation-based memory model
Abstract
This article reviews the major empirical results and theoretical issues from over 20 years of research on people’s acceptance
of false information about recently experienced events (see, e.g., Loftus, 1975). Several theoretical perspectives are assessed
in terms of their ability to account for the various and sometimes conflicting results in the literature. Theoretical perspectives
reviewed include the trace alteration hypothesis, the blocking hypothesis, the task demands/strategic effects hypothesis,
source monitoring, and an activation-based semantic memory account. On the basis of its ability to account for the reviewed
data and other cognitive phenomena, an activation-based semantic network model of memory is suggested for understanding the
data and planning future research in the area.
... Articles with more than 50 citations served as a starting point (albeit an arbitrary one) for our search between 2016 and 2022 (from a total of 25,300 search results); we allowed some exceptions, such as the highly cited Conroy et al. (2015) article on automatic detection of fake news. Research on the term "misinformation" traditionally focused on memory (e.g., Ayers & Reder, 1998;Frost, 2000) with applications to legal settings, specifically eyewitness studies (Wright et al., 2000). There are instances of misinformation in the more general sense, as applied to the news and the Internet, as early as Hernon's (1995) exploratory study. ...
In the last decade there has been a proliferation of research on misinformation. One important aspect of this work that receives less attention than it should is exactly why misinformation is a problem. To adequately address this question, we must first look to its speculated causes and effects. We examined different disciplines (computer science, economics, history, information science, journalism, law, media, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology) that investigate misinformation. The consensus view points to advancements in information technology (e.g., the Internet, social media) as a main cause of the proliferation and increasing impact of misinformation, with a variety of illustrations of the effects. We critically analyzed both issues. As to the effects, misbehaviors are not yet reliably demonstrated empirically to be the outcome of misinformation; correlation as causation may have a hand in that perception. As to the cause, advancements in information technologies enable, as well as reveal, multitudes of interactions that represent significant deviations from ground truths through people's new way of knowing (intersubjectivity). This, we argue, is illusionary when understood in light of historical epistemology. Both doubts we raise are used to consider the cost to established norms of liberal democracy that come from efforts to target the problem of misinformation.
... Une seconde différence est que 32 Thomas, Didierjean 2016b, voir aussi Thomas, Didierjean, Kuhn 2018. 33 Pour des revues de la question, voir Ayers, Reder 1998 ;Loftus 2005. 34 E. g., Loftus 2005. ...
Dans « Le monde perdu », ouvrage de Conan Doyle publié en 1912, une expédition découvre en Amérique du Sud une zone coupée du reste du monde qui abrite de très nombreuses espèces inconnues, héritières directes des dinosaures. Existe-il pour les chercheurs en psychologie un terrain d’étude qui permettrait de découvrir chez l’humain des processus mentaux inconnus ? Dans ce chapitre nous défendons l’idée que la prestidigitation pourrait être le « Monde perdu » des chercheurs en sciences cognitives. En attendant d’y découvrir peut-être un jour des mécanismes mentaux inconnus, ce domaine offre un terrain fertile pour étudier de nombreux processus cognitifs.
... By contrast, the selective-retrieval account assumes that the CIE occurs because, at test, misinformation is retrieved but the corrective information is not (Ayers & Reder, 1998;Lewandowsky et al., 2012). An extension of this account assumes dual processes (see Yonelinas, 2002), specifically that misinformation reliance occurs when misinformation is automatically retrieved due to its familiarity, while there is concurrent failure of strategic processes necessary to recollect the retraction (Ecker et al., 2010). ...
Corrected misinformation can continue to influence inferential reasoning. It has been suggested that such continued influence is partially driven by misinformation familiarity, and that corrections should therefore avoid repeating misinformation to avoid inadvertent
strengthening of misconceptions. However, evidence for such familiarity-backfire effects is scarce. We tested whether familiarity backfire may occur if corrections are processed under cognitive load. Although misinformation repetition may boost familiarity, load may impede integration of the correction, reducing its effectiveness and therefore allowing a backfire effect to emerge. Participants listened to corrections that repeated misinformation while in a driving simulator. Misinformation familiarity was manipulated through the number of
corrections. Load was manipulated through a math task administered selectively during correction encoding. Multiple corrections were more effective than a single correction; cognitive load reduced correction effectiveness, with a single correction entirely ineffective under load. This provides further evidence against familiarity-backfire effects and has implications for real-world debunking.
... Specifically, the CIE has been assumed to arise from selective retrieval of the misinformation, or failure to retrieve the correction. According to this view, memory representations compete for activation, and the CIE occurs if the misinformation is retrieved but its correction is not [13][14][15]. A competing explanation stems from a mental-model account. ...
Misinformation regarding the cause of an event often continues to influence an individual’s event-related reasoning, even after they have received a retraction. This is known as the continued influence effect (CIE). Dominant theoretical models of the CIE have suggested the effect arises primarily from failures to retrieve the correction. However, recent research has implicated information integration and memory updating processes in the CIE. As a behavioural test of integration, we applied an event segmentation approach to the CIE paradigm. Event segmentation theory suggests that incoming information is parsed into distinct events separated by event boundaries, which can have implications for memory. As such, when an individual encodes an event report that contains a retraction, the presence of event boundaries should impair retraction integration and memory updating, resulting in an enhanced CIE. Experiments 1 and 2 employed spatial event segmentation boundaries in an attempt to manipulate the ease with which a retraction can be integrated into a participant’s mental event model. While Experiment 1 showed no impact of an event boundary, Experiment 2 yielded evidence that an event boundary resulted in a reduced CIE. To the extent that this finding reflects enhanced retrieval of the retraction relative to the misinformation, it is more in line with retrieval accounts of the CIE.
As concerns about the effects of health misinformation rise, understanding why misbeliefs are accepted is increasingly important. People believe repeated statements more than novel statements, an effect known as truth by repetition, however this has not been examined in the context of tobacco information. Misbeliefs about tobacco are rampant and novel facts about tobacco are viewed as less believable. This paper examines how repetition of true and false tobacco statements affects truth perceptions. We recruited an online sample of 1,436 U.S. adults in May 2021. In an exposure phase, each participant rated their interest in 30 randomly selected statements about tobacco products and general knowledge trivia, half of them true and half false. The study had a two (tobacco product) by two (familiarity of statement claim) between-subjects design and a two (statement truth) by two (statement repetition) within-subjects design. During the testing phase participants rated the truthfulness of 24 repeated statements and 24 unseen statements. Repetition of true and false tobacco statements increased their subjective truth (diff=.20, p < .001), and the effect was larger for false claims compared to true claims. This underscores the importance of strategies to inoculate people against misinformation and calls for interventions that can stop the repetition of newly generated false claims.
This innovative textbook is the first to integrate learning and memory, behaviour, and cognition. It focuses on fascinating human research in both memory and learning (while also bringing in important animal studies) and brings the reader up to date with the latest developments in the subject. Students are encouraged to think critically: key theories and issues are looked at in detail; descriptions of experiments include why they were done and how examining the method can help evaluate competing viewpoints. By looking at underlying cognitive processes, students come away with a sense of learning and memory being interrelated actions taken by the same human being, rather than two separate activities. Lively and engaging writing is supported by lots of examples of practical applications that show the relevance of lab-based research to everyday life. Examples include treatments for phobias and autism, ways to improve eyewitness testimony, and methods of enhancing study techniques.
Numerous experiments have shown that an evaluative and passive process, known as validation, accompanies activation and integration, which are fundamental processes of text comprehension. During the construction of a mental model, validation implicitly assesses the plausibility of incoming information by checking its consistency with world knowledge, prior beliefs, and contextual information (e.g., the broader discourse context). However, research on potential influences that shape validation processes has just started. One branch of research is investigating how world knowledge and contextual information contribute to integration and validation. World knowledge usually influences validation more strongly because information plausibility is the primary criterion for validation, but strong contextual information can yield influences as well. Contextual information that may be specifically relevant for routine validation is the credibility of a source providing text information. Source credibility bears a strong conceptual relationship to the validity of information. However, a dearth of research has investigated joint effects of plausibility and source credibility for routine validation. To fill this research gap, the aim of the present dissertation was to examine the role of source credibility in routine validation processes of text information. This dissertation argues that both source credibility and plausibility are considered in these processes. In particular, information plausibility is proposed as the primary criterion, but source credibility may modulate validation as an additional criterion. To this end, three studies with five self-paced reading experiments were conducted in which reading times served as an implicit indicator of validation and plausibility judgments as an explicit indicator, and the convergence or divergence between the two indicators was interpreted. The first study examined the interplay of plausibility and source credibility for the validation of world-knowledge consistent versus inconsistent text information embedded in short narratives. This highly plausible or highly implausible information was provided by a high- or low-expertise source. In Study 1, plausibility dominated validation as suggested by faster reading times and higher plausibility judgments for world-knowledge consistent information. Importantly, source credibility modulated the validation of highly implausible information but seemed to not matter for plausible information. High-credible sources increased the implausibility of highly implausible information to a greater extent compared with low-credible sources as indicated by longer reading times and lower plausibility judgments. These results diverged from recent findings from Foy et al. (2017). The second study investigated whether the modulating role of source credibility depends on the degree of implausibility of an information. Thus, Study 2 extended Study 1 by an intermediate, somewhat implausible level of plausibility (comparable to the implausible claims in Foy et al., 2017). Similar to Study 1, plausibility dominated validation as indicated by lower reading times and plausibility judgments with higher world-knowledge inconsistency. Again, source credibility had no effect on the routine validation of plausible information. However, high-credible sources mitigated the implausibility of somewhat implausible information as indicated by faster reading times and higher plausibility judgments but exacerbated the implausibility of highly implausible information as indicated by slower reading times and lower plausibility judgments. In short, Study 2 findings not only integrates the seemingly divergent results of Study 1 and Foy et al. (2017) but also provides strong support for the assumption that the degree of implausibility determines the modulating role of source credibility for validation. The third study examined the relationship of source credibility and plausibility in an ecologically valid social media setting with short Twitter messages varying in world-knowledge and text-belief consistency by trustworthy and untrustworthy sources. In sum, plausibility and to a lesser extent source credibility mattered for routine validation and explicit evaluation of text information as indicated by reading times and plausibility judgments. However, the pattern partly diverged from Study 1 and 2, possibly because the source information was more salient. In sum, the present dissertation yielded three insights. First, the findings further extends evidence for routine validation based on world-knowledge and prior beliefs. Second, the studies suggest that source credibility can modulate validation. Readers used source credibility cues for routine validation and the explicit evaluation of text information in all studies. Third, the impact of source credibility seems to depend on the degree of implausibility of information. The present findings have theoretical implications for theories of validation and text comprehension as well as practical implications for targeting threats associated with the prevalence of inaccurate information, for example, on the World Wide Web. Future research using eye-tracking methodology could further disentangle the routine and strategic underlying processes of the relationship between source credibility and plausibility.
Vaccine rumors on social media endanger public health. This study examined how evidence types influenced perceived persuasiveness and relevance and engagement intentions of vaccine rumors. We conducted a 2 (evidence type: anecdotes vs. anecdotal statistics) × 2 (stance: pro-vaccine rumor vs. anti-vaccine rumor) online experiment (N = 551) and surveyed participants' health literacy and vaccine knowledge. Anecdotal statistics were perceived as more relevant than anecdotes and indirectly influenced perceived persuasiveness and behavior intentions. This finding was confirmed when vaccine rumors were pro-attitudinal. Health literacy positively predicted perceived persuasiveness; health knowledge negatively predicted relevance and behavior intentions. Practical implications and future research directions are discussed.
While many studies have highlighted the existence of the anchoring effect in a wide variety of domains, no study to date has investigated its impact on memory. The present study aims to test whether an irrelevant numerical anchor not only influences an estimate but also modifies the memory of the associated event. Two experiments (total N = 259) were conducted, combining the methodology used by Loftus & Palmer (1974) and a classic anchoring paradigm. The results show that an irrelevant numerical anchor can modify the estimate of a car's speed and produce false memories of the event. We discuss the link between the processes underlying the anchoring effect and the false memory phenomenon.
The frequency with which subjects erroneously included a nonpresented word in their recall of a study list was explored in two experiments. The intrusion error was recalled by as many as 80% of the subjects, and when it was perceived to have been presented early in the study list, it was assigned confidence ratings and phenomenological retrieval characteristics equivalent to those for presented words. As a result, subjects were often unable to discriminate memories of real study words from their memories of a related but nonpresented word. Manipulations of encoding, but not of retrieval, conditions altered both the frequencies of illusory memories and their metamemorial characteristics. The results and paradigm are discussed in terms of their relevance to the "memory-recovery" debate.
Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far-reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source-monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories.
Because of the biasing nature of retrieval tests, evidence that the introduction of misleading postevent information will impair the memory for an original event has recently been in dispute. In two experiments, a retrieval test sensitive to both biasing effects of misinformation (misinformation acceptance) and influences of the misinformation on memory (misinformation interference) was used. Both experiments demonstrated misinformation acceptance, and one of the experiments suggested that misinformation interferes with the ability to remember the original event. Two misinformation interference hypotheses are evaluated; they suggest that the misinformation may have either impaired memory or led to confusion regarding what had occurred during the event.
Throughout the relatively brief period since the invention of the modern Romantic concept of childhood in the nineteenth century (Aries, 1962, cited in Kessen, 1979), and throughout the even briefer history of the science of psychology, the idea of young children serving as eyewitnesses in courts of law has run counter to our notions of children’s capabilities (Goodman, 1984). Now, in the mid-1980s, children’s competency as eyewitnesses has become an important issue, as children more and more frequently are the victims of reported crimes and as psychologists become increasingly concerned with conducting research and constructing theory within “ecologically valid” contexts and constraints (e.g., Bahrick & Karis, 1982; Bronfenbrenner, 1977; Neisser, 1976, 1982, 1985).
Four experiments investigated whether and how interpolated faces cause impairment to memories for related target faces. Participants viewed target faces and then saw a presentation of interpolated faces that were related to some of the targets. Modified tests, which offered target and novel faces as recognition alternatives, detected impairment effects after short retention intervals but not after 48-hr intervals, indicating that spontaneous recovery had occurred. For the interpolated presentations, some participants were misled to believe that the faces were the same as the targets, and others were informed that they were similar but different. The impairment and recovery effects were not moderated by participants' beliefs about the interpolated faces. The recovery effects suggest that interpolated faces affected the retrieval but not the storage of memories for targets, even for participants who were successfully misled about the interpolated faces.
The standard temporal order of events used in studies of eyewitness suggestibility was reversed: Misled subjects were given verbal suggestions about a visual scene before witnessing it. As in the standard procedure, the subjects were later tested on memory of the visual scene. A suggestibility effect was obtained with this reversed procedure, even though the verbal information could not “update” the target memory because no memory of the visual scene existed when the misleading suggestions were given.
Critical issues in the theoretical and experimental analysis of interference processes in retention are reviewed. The evolution of classical two-factor theory is traced, and the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary version of this p6sition are examined. Recent critiques of Current interference theories by Martin (1971a) and Greeno, James, and Da Polito (1971) are reviewed and examind. New conceptualizations of interference proposed by these authors, which place major emphasis on retrieval dependencies and on the role of encoding and retrieval processes, are considered and evaluated.