Believability of evidence matters for correcting social impressions

Abstract

To what extent are we beholden to the information we encounter about others? Are there aspects of cognition that are unduly influenced by gossip or outright disinformation, even when we deem it unlikely to be true? Research has shown that implicit impressions of others are often insensitive to the truth value of the evidence. We examined whether the believability of new, contradictory information about others influenced whether people corrected their implicit and explicit impressions. Contrary to previous work, we found that across seven studies, the perceived believability of new evidence predicted whether people corrected their implicit impressions. Subjective assessments of truth value also uniquely predicted correction beyond other properties of information such as diagnosticity/extremity. This evidence shows that the degree to which someone thinks new information is true influences whether it impacts implicit impressions. implicit | truth | believability | attitudes | first impressions A quip often attributed to Mark Twain proposes that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots" (1). Ironically, it appears that Mark Twain never said this (although this has not prevented it from traveling halfway around the world). Nonetheless, the idea that we find ourselves awash in a sea of misinformation that can lead us to erroneous conclusions has had a long tradition in Western thought, with evidence of variations of this quote circulating as early as the mid-18th century (2). Still, the digital age presents us with the ability to acquire more information-and perhaps more apocryphal information-than at any time in history (see, e.g., ref.3). This is perhaps especially true of the (mis)information that we encounter about other people. The things that we learn about others that form the basis of our impressions of them come to us not just through what we directly observe or what we learn from others at the water cooler, but also through status updates, tweets and retweets, third-party information, and weak links in our social networks. It is now, quite literally, easier than ever before for lies about others to travel halfway around the world.Given the wealth of information available to us, a nontrivial task that we face to successfully exploit it is to accurately decide which particular pieces-and sources-of information deserve our attention, consideration, and, ultimately, acceptance. However, surprisingly, research assessing the processes underlying impression updating in light of new information suggests that we often fall short in this fundamental task. Whereas our explicit impressions (i.e., those that are self-reported and therefore intentional) readily incorporate validity and are highly responsive to the believability of new information, implicit impressions (i.e., those that are measured indirectly and are therefore unintentional) are thought to rely on different underlying processes (4, 5) and appear to be relatively insensitive to such considerations. Accordingly...

Countering misinformation via WhatsApp: Preliminary evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe

“…Thus, while we caution generalizing our results to general public in Zimbabwe, our results speak specifically to the important role that trusted sources play, particularly in confusing informational situations such as health crises [ 29 ], and in an authoritarian context where trust in information might be low [ 30 ]. Existing scholarship emphasizes the importance of how information is framed [ 31 ], and the credibility of the information source for the recipient [ 32 ]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the identification and dissemination of correct information represent an important challenge.…”

Propositional Accounts of Implicit Evaluation: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead

“…Thanks in large part to propositional accounts, empirical research has started probing connections between implicit evaluation and high-level cognition going beyond the passive recording of co-occurrence information, including reasoning about diagnosticity (e.g., Cone & Ferguson, 2015;Cone, Flaharty, & Ferguson, 2019), the reinterpretation of previous evidence (e.g., Mann & Ferguson, 2015), and, crucially for the present purposes, reasoning about relational information (e.g., Zanon, De Houwer, Gast, & Smith, 2014). A comprehensive summary of this literature is beyond the scope of the present article (for recent reviews, see Cone, Mann, & Ferguson, 2017;De Houwer et al, 2020).…”

Propositional accounts of implicit evaluation: Taking stock and looking ahead

“…Thanks in large part to propositional accounts, empirical research has started probing connections between implicit evaluation and high-level cognition going beyond the passive recording of co-occurrence information, including reasoning about diagnosticity (e.g., Cone & Ferguson, 2015;Cone, Flaharty, & Ferguson, 2019), the reinterpretation of previous evidence (e.g., Mann & Ferguson, 2015), and, crucially for the present purposes, reasoning about relational information (e.g., Zanon, De Houwer, Gast, & Smith, 2014). A comprehensive summary of this literature is beyond the scope of the present paper (for recent reviews see Cone, Mann, & Ferguson, 2017;De Houwer et al, 2020).…”