The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction

Abstract

Misinformation has been identified as a major contributor to various contentious contemporary events ranging from elections and referenda to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only can belief in misinformation lead to poor judgements and decision-making, it also exerts a lingering influence on people's reasoning after it has been corrected -an effect known as the continued influence effect. In this Review, we describe the cognitive, social and affective factors that lead people to form or endorse misinformed views, and the psychological barriers to knowledge revision after misinformation has been corrected, including theories of continued influence. We discuss the effectiveness of both pre-emptive ('prebunking') and reactive ('debunking') interventions to reduce the effects of misinformation, as well as implications for information consumers and practitioners in various areas including journalism, public health, policymaking and education.

Vaccination against misinformation: The inoculation technique reduces the continued influence effect

“…Thus, there is a possibility that our results can be generalized to a wider range of conditions (e.g., vaccination or climate change). As inoculation highlights misleading argumentation techniques such as selective use of data or use of fake experts (see: [ 103 ]), thus providing protection from misinformation, it could be beneficial to stress retraction sources characteristics. Additionally, it would also pay off to boost the trustworthiness of the source, if it is perceived as an expert, but not necessarily trustworthy; that potentially would enhance the inoculation effectiveness.…”

Practical recommendations to communicate with patients about health‐related conspiracy theories

“…Health‐related conspiracy theories take many different forms, but typically suggest that information is deliberately concealed from the public by individuals or powerful groups within the government or health industry 5 . Misinformation — or false, misleading information 6 — often contains conspiracy theories, but sometimes it does not. For example, some vaccine‐related misinformation, including that it is better to develop immunity from diseases, is not a conspiracy theory because no malevolent act or actors are involved.…”

Interpersonal factors and mental well‐being are associated with accuracy in judging the veracity of political news

“…The intentions behind the political statements were not considered. So, in this work, misinformation is defined as any information that turns out to be false (Ecker et al, 2022; Guess & Lyons, 2020; Lazer et al, 2018), and the terms “disinformation” and “fake news” are not used.…”

“…This is particularly true during election cycles, where the amount of false information which crosses social media accounts increases (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). To better understand those who are most vulnerable to false information, recent work has begun to diagnose the individual risk factors associated with inaccurately assessing the veracity of political information (Ecker et al, 2022;Pennycook & Rand, 2021;Scheufele & Krause, 2019;Sindermann et al, 2020). While invaluable work has shown that difficulty differentiating true from false political information is linked to cognitive processes, political partisanship, and socio-demographics (Martel et al, 2020), less is known about whether difficulty judging the veracity of political information is associated with individual differences in mental well-being and interpersonal factors.…”

“…Some define misinformation and disinformation in mutually exclusive terms, where disinformation represents false information that is shared with the intention to deceive, where misinformation represents false information that is shared in good faith (Tandoc et al, 2018). Others define misinformation as "any information that turns out to be false" (Ecker et al, 2022), thus disinformation is a subset of misinformation. Further, the term "fake news" seems to change definitions depending on the context (Egelhofer & Lecheler, 2019).…”