Habitual acceptance of misinformation: Examination of individual differences and source attributions

Abstract

This study identifies individuals who are habitually susceptible to accepting postevent misinformation across testing on three separate events. The results indicate that those individuals identified as habitually susceptible exhibited higher dissociation scores and less of an association between memory accuracy and confidence than did the individuals identified as nonhabitually susceptible. When they were asked to identify the source of the remembered information, similar patterns of source attributions were found for all individuals when they were responding correctly and incorrectly to nonmisinformation and when they were correctly rejecting items of misinformation. Importantly, from a source-monitoring perspective, individuals identified as habitually susceptible demonstrated a different pattern of source attributions than did those classified as nonhabitually susceptible when they were accepting misinformation. Habitually susceptible individuals were as likely to attribute the source of their memory incorrectly to something seen in the experienced event as to attribute it correctly to something read after the fact.

Reduction of the misinformation effect by arousal induced after learning

“…The rate of misinformation endorsement was consistent with and even slightly higher than in previous studies (Cann & Katz, 2005;Tomes & Katz, 1997), possibly because of the additional events and the longer interval between encoding and testing (Higham, 1998).…”

“…Thus, the confidence and misinformation results further support the interpretation that arousal enhanced memory consolidation, possibly via modulation of both episodic and source memory. Ideally, future studies would examine the specific effects of arousal on source monitoring, original events, misinformation items, and the respective sources of each item (Cann & Katz, 2005). Kensinger (2007) suggested that emotion or arousal specifically enhances memory for source details that have "affective relevance" (p. 215) to emotional stimuli.…”

“…A 2 (misinformation/control) x 2 (arousal/ neutral) between-subjects design was employed where participants viewed multiple film clips that were either followed by forced-choice recognition questions that contained multiple items of misinformation or no misinformation at all (Cann & Katz, 2005;Tomes & Katz, 1997). Afterward, participants either watched a negatively arousing or neutral film clip.…”

The influence of delusional ideation and dissociative experiences on the resistance to false memories in normal healthy subjects

“…These authors argued that dissociation might influence some specific false memory tasks that require only misattributing the source of a presented item and not the DRM paradigm which requires both generation and misattribution of the critical lure. This argument is not consistent with the current results as we found that a measure of dissociative experiences was positively associated with a higher susceptibility to false recall (see also, Cann & Katz, 2005). In addition, DES-C scores were not associated with the activation of the critical lure.…”

The misinformation effect revisited: Interactions between spontaneous memory processes and misleading suggestions

“…The first perspective focuses on the potentially interfering effect of MPI on correct retrieval of the event items (e.g., Belli, Lindsay, Gales, & McCarthy, 1994;Chandler, 1989;Eakin, Schreiber, & Sergent-Marshall, 2003;Lindsay, 1990;Paz-Alonso & Goodman, 2008;Schreiber & Sergent, 1998), which we will refer to as misinformation interference (following Belli, 1989;Chandler, Gargano, & Holt, 2001). The second perspective focuses on the potential effect of MPI in inducing false reports of the misleading items (e.g., Ayers & Reder, 1998;Blank, 1998;Cann & Katz, 2005;Higham, 1998;Lindsay, 1990;Pansky & Tenenboim, in press;Paz-Alonso & Goodman, 2008;Tousignant, Hall, & Loftus, 1986;Zaragoza & Koshmider 1989;Zaragoza & Lane, 1994), which we will refer to as suggestibility (following Chambers & Zaragoza, 2001). Obviously, the two perspectives are strongly related.…”