Investigating the Generation and Spread of Numerical Misinformation: A Combined Eye Movement Monitoring and Social Transmission Approach

Abstract

Numerical facts play a prominent role in public discourse, but individuals often provide incorrect estimates of policy-relevant numerical quantities (e.g., the number of immigrants in the country). Across two studies, we examined the role of schemas in the creation of numerical misinformation, and how misinformation can spread via person-to-person communication. In our first study, we combined eye movement monitoring and behavioral methods to examine how schemas distorted what people remembered about policy-relevant numerical information. Then, in a second study, we examined the consequences of these memory distortions via the social transmission of numerical information, using the serial reproduction paradigm. We found that individuals misremembered numerical information in a manner consistent with their schemas, and that person-to-person transmission can exacerbate these memory errors. Our studies highlight the mechanisms supporting the generation and spread of numerical misinformation and demonstrate the utility of a multi-method approach in the study of misinformation.

Using measures of psychophysiological and neural activity to advance understanding of psychological processes in politics

“…Second, in combination with an innovative experimental design, eye-tracking is used to track gender and partisan biases (Coronel & Federmeier, 2016;Coronel, Moore, & deBuys, 2021;Coronel, Poulsen, & Sweitzer, 2020) in political information processing.…”

Communication of Uncertainty about Preliminary Evidence and the Spread of Its Inferred Misinformation during the COVID-19 Pandemic—A Weibo Case Study

“…In the COVID-19 pandemic, lowquality preprints are also found to be an important driver of the misinfo-demic [10]. While studies focused largely on the above external resources from the environment that disseminate false information, Coronel, Poulsen, and Sweitzer reveal that memory biases and distortions of accurate information are an internal source of misinformation [12], in which misinformation is generated through individuals' memory processes after their exposure to factually accurate information [13].…”

“…First, research on internal sources of misinformation is scarce. Though Coronel et al [12] reveal memory biases as an internal source of misinformation, they assume a context where people are exposed to factually accurate information from the environment. However, in health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, much information is preliminary and uncertain when it is first communicated with the public, and it is observed that misinformation can naturally arise from the preliminary information.…”

Building an Informing Science Model in Light of Fake News

“…An upcoming paper by Brashier and Marsh (2020) affirms that people more readily accept information that fits their biases and to which they have ready access; repetition of lies makes them more believable. A recently published paper by Coronel, Poulsen, and Sweitzer (2019) shows experimentally that people tend to believe as true information provided to them, but their biases affect what they remember. In the experiment, subjects told others what they had just learned.…”