Social endorsement influences the continued belief in corrected misinformation.

Abstract

Reliance on misinformation often persists in the face of corrections. However, the role of social factors on people's reliance on corrected misinformation has received little attention. In two experiments, we investigated the extent to which social endorsement of misinformation and corrections influences belief updating. In both experiments misinformation and fact-checks were presented as social media posts, and social endorsement was manipulated via the number of "likes." In Experiment 1, social endorsement of the initial misinformation had a significant influence on belief; participants believed misinformation with high social endorsement more than misinformation with low endorsement. This effect was observed pre-factcheck and post-fact-check. High social endorsement of the fact-checks was associated with reduced misinformation belief; however, evidence for the persistence of this effect was mixed. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2. Our findings indicate that social endorsement can moderate our beliefs in

Preventing belief in misinformation: Current and future directions for the field.

“…Thus, I was pleased to see research in the special section focused on the impact of these social cues. Across two studies, high levels of social endorsement (∼1,000 likes on a social media post) led to greater belief in both false claims and misinformation corrections—as compared to posts with low (∼10 likes) social endorsement (Butler et al, 2023). In addition, personality characteristics such as the Dark Factor of Personality examined by Rudloff and Appel (2023) in the current section are understudied as possible influences on belief in misinformation.…”

“…In addition, we are often most interested in not whether people believe the misinformation but whether they will rely on the false information when making other decisions. Thus, it is exciting that both Sanderson et al (2023) and Butler et al (2023) in this section include inference questions as an outcome. These questions measure whether people rely on the false information in later reasoning.…”

“…These questions measure whether people rely on the false information in later reasoning. For example, in Butler et al (2023), participants who saw the false statement “Students learn best when teaching styles are matched to their learning style” would later rate their agreement with the statement “Teachers should disregard learning styles when developing their curriculum.” Such questions offer an opportunity to both increase the number of items measuring belief in a particular claim (because one can ask multiple inference questions for a given statement) and to measure how the misinformation is affecting people’s reasoning and later decisions.…”

Others (dis‐)endorse this so it must (not) be true: High relative endorsement increases perceived misinformation veracity but not correction effectiveness

“…Minimum sample size was set to 352 (in line with Butler et al, 2022). Prolific workers who had participated in any of the studies in Butler et al (2022) were excluded from the study invitation. To ensure adequate sample size post-exclusions, a total of 376 participants were recruited.…”

“…However, there is also evidence that belief in false information following a correction may be lower, at least initially, when the correction has a high (vs. low) level of positive engagement (Butler et al, 2022;Vlasceanu & Coman, 2021). This is potentially encouraging, as it suggests endorsement of fact-checks may at least somewhat counteract endorsement of misinformation.…”