Can confidence help account for and redress the effects of reading inaccurate information?

Abstract

Being exposed to inaccurate information in fiction can negatively influence post-reading judgments and decisions. For example, people make more errors judging the validity of statements after reading stories containing related inaccurate as compared to related accurate assertions. While these effects have been demonstrated in a variety of studies, people's confidence in their postreading judgments has received little attention. The current experiments examined whether exposure to accurate and inaccurate information embedded in fiction influences readers' confidence in judging the validity of related claims. Participants read an extended story containing accurate and inaccurate assertions about the world (Experiment 1a) or a control story omitting those assertions (Experiment 1b). Afterwards they judged the validity of single statements related to the critical assertions and provided confidence ratings for each judgment. While participants made more judgment errors after having read inaccurate assertions than after having read accurate assertions or stories without assertions, they were overall less confident in their incorrect as compared to correct judgments. Given the observed relationship between confidence and judgment accuracy, in Experiments 2 and 3 we tested whether allowing and instructing participants to withhold responses might reduce judgment errors. This withholding option reduced participants' incorrect and correct judgments, failing to specifically eliminate the negative consequences of exposure to inaccurate assertions. These findings are discussed with respect to accounts documenting the influence of inaccurate information, and highlight confidence as a relevant but understudied factor in previous empirical demonstrations of such effects.

Misinformed and unaware? Metacognition and the influence of inaccurate information.

“…Across three studies, participants made more errors in judging validity of statements after previously reading inaccurate as compared with accurate assertions related to those statements. The experiments provide a direct replication of past research demonstrating the influence of false information on people’s judgments and beliefs (Appel & Richter, 2007; Donovan et al, 2018; Gerrig & Prentice, 1991; Marsh et al, 2003; Rapp et al, 2014; Salovich et al, 2020). We additionally examined people’s awareness of their susceptibility to inaccurate information by comparing their self-reported estimated resistance to the actual effects that exposure to inaccuracies had on postreading judgments.…”

“…Participants’ judgments were influenced by the inaccurate information they previously read in the story. They made three times as many judgment errors after reading the inaccurate version of an assertion as compared with after reading the accurate version, offering a direct replication of previous findings using the same materials (Donovan, Theodosis, & Rapp, 2018; Gerrig & Prentice, 1991; Rapp et al, 2014; Salovich, Donovan, Hinze, & Rapp, 2020).…”

“…These methods could reveal the moment-by-moment mechanisms involved in processing, recognizing, and integrating inaccurate contents into mental representations as derived from discourse contexts and real-world understandings (Rapp & Mensink, 2011). All of these possible projects would help refine accounts of the metacognitive considerations that underlie diverse comprehension experiences but that, again, have been largely ignored with respect to inaccurate information experiences (but see Salovich et al, 2020, for an empirical examination involving different materials, contexts, and tasks as related to considerations of metacognitive control).…”

The Psychology of Fake News

“…Furthermore, experimentally manipulating participants' level of deliberation demonstrates a causal effect whereby deliberation reduces belief in false (but not true) news, regardless of partisan alignment (and has no effect on polarization) [26]. Research also shows that overconfidence may contribute to susceptibility to false information [38], perhaps because it stops people from slowing down and engaging in reflective reasoning [39,40].…”

The Psychology of Fake News

“…Furthermore, experimentally manipulating participants' level of deliberation demonstrates a causal effect whereby deliberation causes a reduction in belief in false news, regardless of ideological alignment (and has no effect on polarization) [32]. Research also shows that overconfidence may contribute to susceptibility to false information [55], perhaps because it stops people from slowing down and engaging in reflective reasoning [43,56].…”