Misinformation – past, present, and future

ABSTRACT

Decades of research have provided clear support for the misinformation effect. Exposure to misinformation after an event takes place puts memory accuracy at risk. Experts have long warned of the dangers of this phenomenon in legal contexts (e.g. for eyewitness memory) and new concerns about misinformation and its pervasiveness have arisen in recent years in the context of ‘fake news’. We need new approaches to combat misinformation and prevent its potential far-reaching consequences in real-world contexts with major implications for societal issues such as legal justice, community health, and politics. Here we briefly review the misinformation effect and call for an expansion of the small body of literature on means to prevent and correct misinformation. We end by discussing the new challenges technology and social media pose to memory and knowledge accuracy and propose new research directions to combat this changing landscape of misinformation delivery.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• misinformation
• false memory

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.