Is justice blind or myopic? An examination of the effects of meta-cognitive myopia and truth bias on mock jurors and judges

Pantazi, Myrto; Klein, Olivier; Kissine, Mikhaïl

doi:10.1017/s1930297500007361

Cited by 5 publications

References 62 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

The Achilles’ heel of the truth bias? High personal stakes reduce vulnerability to false information

Pantazi,

Klein,

Kissine

2024

Euro J Social Psych

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While, by default, people tend to believe communicated content, it is also possible that they become more vigilant when personal stakes increase. A lab (N = 72) and an online (N = 284) experiment show that people make judgements affected by explicitly tagged false information and that they misremember such information as true – a phenomenon dubbed the ‘truth bias’. However, both experiments show that this bias is significantly reduced when personal stakes – instantiated here as a financial incentive – become high. Experiment 2 also shows that personal stakes mitigate the truth bias when they are high at the moment of false information processing, but they cannot reduce belief in false information a posteriori, that is once participants have already processed false information. Experiment 2 also suggests that high stakes reduce belief in false information whether participants’ focus is directed towards making accurate judgements or correctly remembering information truthfulness. We discuss the implications of our findings for models of information validation and interventions against real‐world misinformation.

show abstract