The effect of peers’ beliefs on change-recollection driven rejection of misinformation
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Timothy R. Alexander (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Christopher Wahlheim
Abstract: Once false information has been encoded, it can be difficult to diminish its influence. The persistent effect of misinformation on later learning, even after the misinformation has been retracted or corrected, is referred to as the continued influence effect (CIE) of misinformation. One possible explanation is that corrections often repeat misinformation and thereby increase its familiarity. Recent work has shown that this increased familiarity is associated with the CIE when corrections are not recollected. The present experiment expands upon those findings by investigating whether a factor known to influence perceived familiarity, cohort agreement, affects participants’ ability to detect and recollect corrections of misinformation. Participants first studied true and false statements taken from actual media sources, along with fictional representations of how many people believed each statement to be true. In a second phase, true statements were affirmed, false statements were corrected, and participants reported when they detected corrections. Participants were then tested on the information from the second phase and reported whether each statement had earlier been corrected. The present results replicated previous work showing that memory for was associated with reduced CIE, but cohort agreement was not associated with performance on any of the memory measures. These results provide another demonstration of the powerful association between recollection of corrections and memory for correct statements.
The effect of peers’ beliefs on change-recollection driven rejection of misinformation
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Created on 8/1/2019
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Language: English
- Date: 2019
- Keywords
- Change recollection, Conformity, Continued influence, Memory, Misinformation, News
- Subjects
- Common fallacies $x Psychological aspects
- Recollection (Psychology)
- Memory $x Social aspects
- Conformity