Debriefing works: Successful retraction of misinformation following a fake news study

Abstract

In recent years there has been an explosion of research on misinformation, often involving experiments where participants are presented with fake news stories and subsequently debriefed. In order to avoid potential harm to participants or society, it is imperative that we establish whether debriefing procedures remove any lasting influence of misinformation. In the current study, we followed up with 1547 participants one week after they had been exposed to fake news stories about COVID-19 and then provided with a detailed debriefing. False memories and beliefs for previously-seen fake stories declined from the original study, suggesting that the debrief was effective. Moreover, the debriefing resulted in reduced false memories and beliefs for novel fake stories, suggesting a broader impact on participants’ willingness to accept misinformation. Small effects of misinformation on planned health behaviours observed in the original study were also eliminated at follow-up. Our findings suggest that when a careful and thorough debriefing procedure is followed, researchers can safely and ethically conduct misinformation research on sensitive topics.

Face/Off: Changing the face of movies with deepfakes

“…Participants provided informed consent at the start of the online survey, by clicking to indicate their consent. As misinformation researchers must ensure they are not causing harm with their experimental methods [ 41 ]), participants were debriefed using techniques that have shown to be effective in prior false memory research [ 42 , 43 ].…”

Trust Us - We Are the (Covid-19 Misinformation) Experts: A critical scoping review of expert meanings of ‘misinformation’ in the Covid era

“…The themes of loss of trust by the public in traditional institutions and the pressing need for effective strategies that would help to recover that trust were central across sources. That said, while proposed solutions to the problem of MDM, in both medical (Greene and Murphy 2023) and social sciences sources (E. Lee et al 2023), included, for example, debunking MDM by exposing presumed falsehoods, or, again according to both medical (Rodriguez-Morales and Franco 2021; Wilhelm et al 2023) and social science (Cameron et al 2023;Randall, Dalal, and Dowden 2023) sources, increasing the health literacy of populations, success was seen as depending less on offering arguments or evidence to counter MDM and more on managing public perception.…”

“…Finally, experts appeared especially concerned with "anti-vaxx" or "anti-vaccine" activists and movements, believed to produce and spread MDM. This was the case across multiple sources, both medical (Ghaddar et al 2022;Greene and Murphy 2023;Harper and Attwell 2022;Horton 2020;Hotez, Batista, Amor, et al 2021;Mills and…”

Towards more ethical social media field experiments

“…In many instances, the risks are likely small, but this may not always be so, such as in the case of vaccines or elections. Fortunately, these can be avoided by more researchers adopting practices like debriefing participants; although quantitative estimate are hard to come by, (6) report that fewer than 30% of papers currently report any debriefing at all.…”