The Role of Influence of Presumed Influence and Anticipated Guilt in Evoking Social Correction of COVID-19 Misinformation

ABSTRACT

Misinformation on social media pertaining to COVID-19 poses a great threat to public health. The active correction of misinformation by social media users and an understanding of the drivers of such behavior can help solve this ongoing issue. Drawing on the influence of presumed influence model and cognitive appraisal theory, an online experiment (N = 400) was conducted to examine how exposure to corrective messages with regard to COVID-19 misinformation induced individuals’ threat appraisals of the influence of the misinformation on others and how these threat appraisals and the corresponding emotional responses motivated individuals to take corrective actions. The results suggested that people’s perceptions of the severity of the influence of misinformation on others engendered anticipated guilt, which, in turn, strengthened their intentions to correct misinformation related to COVID-19. The study offers guidance on how to effectively craft a corrective message to encourage audiences to counter misinformation together.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Stella C. Chia for her valuable comments during the revision of this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank the two reviewers for their constructive comments.

Notes

1. We originally used six items in total to measure participants’ intention to correct misinformation. However, the other three items (i.e., “I report the post so it gets removed,” “I unfollow or block the person who posted the misinformation,” and “I ignore the misinformation”) were removed because they failed to load on the same latent variable and their factor loadings were relatively low (.69, .41, and −.42; all below .70).