Examining the replicability of backfire effects after standalone corrections

Abstract

Corrections are a frequently used and effective tool for countering misinformation. However, concerns have been raised that corrections may introduce false claims to new audiences when the misinformation is novel. This is because boosting the familiarity of a claim can increase belief in that claim, and thus exposing new audiences to novel misinformation—even as part of a correction—may inadvertently lead to the formation of misconceptions. Such an outcome could be conceptualized as a familiarity backfire effect, whereby a familiarity boost increases false-claim endorsement above a control-condition or pre-correction baseline. Here, we examined whether standalone corrections—that is, corrections presented without initial misinformation exposure—can backfire and increase participants’ reliance on the misinformation in their subsequent inferential reasoning, relative to a no-misinformation, no-correction control condition. Across three experiments (total N = 1156) we found no evidence for a familiarity backfire effect under conditions that are theoretically conducive to it occurring. Standalone corrections did not backfire immediately (Experiment 1), after a one-week delay (Experiment 2), nor with scenarios selected to induce skepticism regarding the correction (Experiment 3), although the corrections effectively reduced misconceptions only in some conditions. Overall, these are heartening results, indicating that those seeking to combat misinformation can continue to use corrections as a safe and efficacious tool even with novel misinformation.

Don’t Believe Them! Reducing Misinformation Influence Through Source Discreditation

“…This is in line with a number of other investigations that included source discreditation alongside contentfocussed corrections as an element of a successful debunking intervention (e.g., MacFarlane et al, 2021;Paynter et al, 2019;Tay et al, 2022). A recent study conducted in a simulated social-media environment found that the presence of source-credibility information boosted participants' discernment between true and false social-media posts (Prike, Butler, et al, 2023). The authors argued that this effect was in part driven by a correlation between sourcecredibility scores and the veracity of the online post.…”