The independent effects of source expertise and trustworthiness on retraction believability: The moderating role of vested interest

Discrediting health disinformation sources: Advantages of highlighting low expertise

Disinformation is false information spread intentionally, and it is particularly harmful for public health. We conducted three preregistered experiments (N = 1,568) investigating how to discredit dubious health sources and disinformation attributed to them. Experiments 1 and 2 used cancer information and recruited representative U.S. samples. Participants read a vignette about a seemingly reputable source and rated their credibility. Participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or interventions that (a) corrected the source's disinformation, (b) highlighted the source's low expertise, or (c) corrected disinformation and highlighted low expertise (Experiment 2). Next, participants rated their belief in the source's disinformation claims and rerated their credibility. We found that highlighting low expertise was equivalent to (or more effective than) other interventions for reducing belief in disinformation. Highlighting low expertise was also more effective than correcting disinformation for reducing source credibility, although combining it with correcting disinformation outperformed low expertise alone (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 extended this paradigm to vaccine information in vaccinated and unvaccinated subgroups. A conflict-of-interest intervention and 1 week retention interval were also added. Highlighting low expertise was the most effective intervention in both vaccinated and unvaccinated participants for reducing belief in disinformation and source credibility. It was also the only condition where belief change was sustained over 1 week, but only in the vaccinated subgroup. In sum, highlighting a source's lack of expertise is a promising option for fact-checkers and health practitioners to reduce belief in disinformation and perceived credibility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Don't believe them! Reducing misinformation influence through source discreditation

Misinformation often continues to influence people's reasoning even after it has been corrected. Therefore, an important aim of applied cognition research is to identify effective measures to counter misinformation. One frequently recommended but hitherto insufficiently tested strategy is source discreditation, that is, attacking the credibility of a misinformation source. In two experiments, we tested whether immediate source discreditation could reduce people's subsequent reliance on fictional event-related misinformation. In Experiment 1, the discreditation targeted a person source of misinformation, pointing to a conflict of interest. This intervention was compared with a commonly employed message-focused correction and a combination of correction and discreditation. The discreditation alone was effective, but less effective than a correction, with the combination of both most effective. Experiment 2 compared discreditations that targeted a person versus a media source of misinformation, pointing either to a conflict of interest or a poor track record of communication. Discreditations were effective for both types of sources, although track-record discreditations were less effective when the misinformation source was a media outlet compared to a person. Results demonstrate that continued influence of misinformation is shaped by social as well as cognitive factors and that source discreditation is a broadly applicable misinformation countermeasure.

How do forewarnings and post-warnings affect misinformation reliance? The impact of warnings on the continued influence effect and belief regression

People often continue to rely on certain information in their reasoning, even if this information has been retracted; this is called the continued influence effect (CIE) of misinformation. One technique for reducing this effect involves explicitly warning people that there is a possibility that they might have been misled. The present study aimed to investigate these warnings' effectiveness, depending on when they were given (either before or after misinformation). In two experiments (N = 337), we found that while a forewarning did reduce reliance on misinformation, retrospectively warned participants (when the warning was placed either between the misinformation and the retraction or just before testing) relied on the misinformation to a similar degree as unwarned participants. However, the protective effect of the forewarning was not durable, as shown by the fact that reliance on the misinformation increased for over 7 days following the first testing, despite continued memory of the retraction.