Correction after misinformation: Does engagement in media multitasking affect attitude adjustment?

ABSTRACT

Research shows that high levels of media multitasking (either situationally induced or chronic) may be associated with decreased cognitive function. Since cognitive capacity is required for efficient correction of one’s judgment after learning that the basis of the judgement is no longer valid, we expected that high levels of media multitasking would decrease one’s ability to adequately update one’s beliefs. We ran two studies in which participants were asked to form an impression of a target person based on their profile on a professional networking site. The profile contained either neutral information (control condition) or a negative comment which was later disproven (false-information conditions). We additionally manipulated media multitasking demands (in Study 1) or measured participants’ frequency of media multitasking (Study 2) and tested whether the level of media multitasking is related to the degree to which the initial attitudes were adjusted after learning that the negative comment was false. We found a significant but rather small effect of the manipulation in Study 1 indicating that participants in both multitasking conditions had more negative attitudes after the correction compared to the baseline, but not to the mono-tasking condition. Crucially, media multitasking demands did not impact attitude adjustment. The results of Study 2 showed that the relationship between media-multitasking frequency measured with a scale and attitude adjustment was non-significant. Overall, the findings provide no evidence that media multitasking – whether experimentally manipulated or chronic – plays a role in correction after misinformation. The study data and code are available at https://osf.io/xu6qd/

KEYWORDS:

• Misinformation
• media multitasking
• correction
• attitude adjustment
• false information

Acknowledgments

The research is supported by Jagiellonian University’s Young Researchers Grant, awarded to Piotr Dragon. Gabriela Czarnek’s work was supported by a MOBILITY PLUS grant (no. 1614/MOB/V/2017/0).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Notes

1. The labels of the conditions refer to how the tasks were instructed to perform rather than how the information related to each task was cognitively processed.

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGRfIQp937g

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRrFyP0O36M

4. The number of switches indicated by the plug-in decreased by the number of tabs minus 1 (there were 6 tabs). We excluded from this analysis 13 participants for whom we did not record the number of switches due to an equipment failure.

5. Study 2 was run in May 2020, when people in many countries were experiencing lockdown as a response to COVID-19 pandemic. Although our hypotheses were unrelated to this issue, the target person was supposedly a nurse, i.e. a member of a critical workforce. Although this could impact the overall perception of nurses and other key workers, we doubt whether this issue could bias people’s correction of false information.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education [1614/MOB/V/2017/0]; Jagiellonian University in Krakow [Young Researchers Grant].