Does evaluating belief prior to its retraction influence the efficacy of later corrections?

ABSTRACT

News stories unfold over time, with initial reports sometimes containing mistaken accounts of the newsworthy outcome that are ultimately revised or corrected. Because facts associated with newsworthy events are accumulated in this piecemeal fashion, readers often have repeated opportunities to reflect upon, discuss, and evaluate their belief in these accounts before they learn that initial news reports have been revised or retracted. The primary goal of the present study was to assess whether rating the strength of one’s belief in the initially reported, mistaken cause might influence the efficacy of a later correction. In the current study, participants evaluated their belief in the target cause by either rating how much they believed it caused the outcome (Experiment 1) or rating the probability that the target caused the outcome (Experiment 2). The results showed that evaluating belief in a target cause prior to its retraction (relative to not doing so) rendered the correction more effective. This enhanced correction effect was not observed when participants generated the target information prior to its retraction (Experiment 3). Collectively, the results suggest that it is not how much people believe something, but whether they have thought about why they do or do not believe it, that affects their later willingness to revise their mistaken beliefs.

KEYWORDS:

• Continued influence effect
• correcting mistaken news reports
• evaluating belief

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this article is based on a thesis conducted by Jaruda Ithisuphalap in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the master’s degree at Kent State University. We thank Carly Rusciolelli, Catherine Paugh, Devan Doss-Dupree, Emily Buttitta, Erika Zuga, Haley Adams, Hannah Porach, Jacob Montgomery, Johanna Stimmel, Kane Swanson, Lauren Urban, Liza Kiefer, Robbi Davis, and Zoe Beard for assistance with data collection and scoring.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As in E1, removing participants with factual memory scores below one standard deviation from the mean (n’s =29, and 33 for E2 and E3) did not change the pattern of results in E2 and E3. Hence, we did not exclude participants with poor memory from the analyses.

2 Although some studies have used the difference between pre-correction and post-correction scores as a measure of correction effects, this was not the measure of correction effects employed in this study. This is because only the rate belief condition had pre- and post-correction ratings on the belief rating measure (there were no pre-post correction inference questions). Because the goal of the study was to compare the magnitude of the correction effect in the rate belief condition relative to the other pre-correction processing conditions (no exposure and passive exposure), for all conditions, the dependent variable was belief in the target on the final phase 4 post-correction questionnaire (assessed with both direct and indirect measures). To assess the magnitude of the correction effect in each of the three pre-correction processing conditions, we compared responses on this final questionnaire for the corrected vs. uncorrected conditions nested within each of these processing conditions.