Political Attitudes and the Processing of Misinformation Corrections

By Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Lina. Ang. Political Psychology, 2018

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Misinformation often continues to influence people’s memory and inferential reasoning after it has been retracted; this is known as the continued influence effect (CIE). Previous research investigating the role of attitude-based motivated reasoning in this context has found conflicting results: Some studies have found that worldview can have a strong impact on the magnitude of the CIE, such that retractions are less effective if the misinformation is congruent with a person’s relevant attitudes, in which case the retractions can even backfire. Other studies have failed to find evidence for an effect of attitudes on the processing of misinformation corrections. The present study used political misinformation— specifically fictional scenarios involving misconduct by politicians from left-wing and rightwing parties—and tested participants identifying with those political parties. Results showed that in this type of scenario, partisan attitudes have an impact on the processing of retractions, in particular (1) if the misinformation relates to a general assertion rather than just a specific singular event, and (2) if the misinformation is congruent with a conservative partisanship.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/406806e61951d149b90d9bd54940791e9f2f0b64

Citations in the corpus

• Combatting climate change misinformation: Evidence for longevity of inoculation and consensus messaging effects (2020, unknown): “When the correction goes against the prevailing worldview of a polarised group, this correction may even backfire, though it should be noted that the literature on backfire effects is increasingly debated (see Ecker et al., 2014; Ecker & Ang, 2019; Guess & Coppock, 2018; T. Wood & Porter, 2019).”