A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Continued Influence of Misinformation in the Face of Correction: How Powerful Is It, Why Does It Happen, and How to Stop It?

By Nathan Walter, Riva H. Tukachinsky. Communication Research, 2019

399 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the extent of continued influence of misinformation in the face of correction and the theoretical explanations of this phenomenon. Aggregation of results from 32 studies (N = 6,527) revealed that, on average, correction does not entirely eliminate the effect of misinformation (r = –.05, p = .045). Corrective messages were found to be more successful when they are coherent, consistent with the audience’s worldview, and delivered by the source of the misinformation itself. Corrections are less effective if the misinformation was attributed to a credible source, the misinformation has been repeated multiple times prior to correction, or when there was a time lag between the delivery of the misinformation and the correction. These findings are consistent with predictions based on theories of mental models and offer concrete recommendations for practitioners.

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef4e5a4009814a03adb47947ba57b559c2b8383a

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating the Impact of Attempts to Correct Health Misinformation on Social Media: A Meta-Analysis (2020, methodology): “Following the literature on the continued influence effect and mental models (Walter & Tukachinsky, 2020), one can expect simple rebuttals to be more effective when people have relatively limited knowledge on the topic (no pre-established mental models) whereas cognitive elaborations are more…”
Faking Fake News for Real Fake News Detection: Propaganda-Loaded Training Data Generation (2022, background): “The dissemination of false information can cause chaos, hatred, and trust issues, and can eventually hinder the development of society as a whole (De-watana and Adillah, 2021; Wasserman and Madrid-Morales, 2019).”
Creating News Literacy Messages to Enhance Expert Corrections of Misinformation on Twitter (2020, background): “Such a process may be especially likely when counter-attitudinal corrections occur immediately after misinformation (Walter & Tukachinsky, 2019), before such misinformation becomes ingrained.”
The Debunking Handbook 2020 (2020, neutral): “Source credibility also matters for corrections of misinformation, although perhaps to a lesser extent 51, 53 .”