Reminders and repetition of misinformation: Helping or hindering its retraction?

By Ullrich K. H. Ecker, J. Hogan, Stephan Lewandowsky. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 2017

109 citations recorded by the source corpus.

People frequently rely on information even after it has been retracted, a phenomenon known as the continued-influence effect of misinformation. One factor proposed to explain the ineffectiveness of retractions is that repeating misinformation during a correction may inadvertently strengthen the misinformation by making it more familiar. Practitioners are therefore often encouraged to design corrections that avoid misinformation repetition. The current study tested this recommendation, investigating whether retractions become more or less effective when they include reminders or repetitions of the initial misinformation. Participants read fictional reports, some of which contained retractions of previous information, and inferential reasoning was measured via questionnaire. Retractions varied in the extent to which they served as misinformation reminders. Retractions that explicitly repeated the misinformation were more effective in reducing misinformation effects than retractions that avoided repetition, presumably because of enhanced salience. Recommendations for effective myth debunking may thus need to be revised.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24c3c27970ca8b7d093ca03d5742957269412ffd

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. David G. Rand
2. Gordon Pennycook
3. B. Swire‐Thompson
4. David M. J. Lazer
5. Neil Shah
6. Srijan Kumar
7. Nicholas C. Dias

In Social Psychology

1. David G. Rand
2. Gordon Pennycook
3. David M. J. Lazer

In Sociology and Political Science

1. David G. Rand
2. Gordon Pennycook
3. Ashley Jardina
4. B. Swire‐Thompson
5. David M. J. Lazer
6. Michael W. Traugott
7. S. van der Linden
8. Nicholas C. Dias

Citations in the corpus

• The Debunking Handbook 2020 (2020, unknown): “Thus, while repeating misinformation generally increases familiarity and truth ratings, repeating a myth while refuting it has been found to be safe in many circumstances, and can even make the correction more salient and effective 71 .”
• The Genesis of the Birther Rumor: Partisanship, Racial Attitudes, and Political Knowledge (2018, background): “For an exception, see Ecker, Hogan, and Lewandowsky (2017).”
• Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality (2019, background): “Indeed, correcting misinformation and replacing it with accurate information can diminish (although not entirely undo) the continued influence of misinformation (4, 5), and explicit warnings diminish (but, again, do not entirely undo) later false belief (6).”
• Public Health and Online Misinformation: Challenges and Recommendations. (2019, background): “Furthermore, repetition of corrections also appears to be helpful for reducing the continued influence effect (26, 27).”