Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Paper: Even after debunking, misinformation and ‘fake news’ persist

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on,” Winston Churchill once famously said.

Or was it the infinitely quotable Mark Twain who said it first? Jonathan Swift … ? Or Alexander Pope … ?

Once it’s unleashed, the effects of misinformation – whether it’s a misattributed quote or even something less benign like the often-cited “fake news”phenomenon – persist. Even in the face of a prevailing counterargument or evidence, misinformation can’t be wholly eradicated, says a new paper co-written by a University of Illinois expert in social psychology.

Although a detailed message that effectively countered misinformation correlated positively with its debunking, it also led to the “misinformation-persistence effect,” according to a meta-analysis published by Dolores Albarracin, a professor of psychology at Illinois.

“Misinformation can have a large impact,” Albarracin said. “If you’re going into something with a blank slate, your first impression is a huge one. And if that first impression is misinformation, it’s still hard to erase or correct. Sometimes you can be successful, but it will rarely be as successful as the initial misinformation.”

The meta-analysis considered relevant scholarship about news reports published between 1994-2015 in areas such as political science, communication and public health. The authors conclude that consumers of misinformation later struggle to question and change their initial attitudes and beliefs.

“The way in which social and cognitive psychologists understand this is that you form a mental model the first time you take in the information, which ultimately is not easy to remove,” said Albarracin, also a professor of business administration. “Unless you get people to, essentially, rebuild a new model, the earlier information will likely stick.”

To combat misinformation, the authors offer three recommendations:

  • Reduce the creation of arguments in line with the misinformation.
  • Create conditions that facilitate scrutiny and criticism of misinformation.
  • Correct misinformation with new detailed information – but keep expectations low.

Misinformation is like a stain in that it’s much easier “to introduce than it is to remove later on,” Albarracin said.

“The primary way to do it better, to erase that stain, is you really have to change the attitude of the audience,” she said. “You have to make them question the misinformation in an active way. The message has to enact some sort of inner change on the audience for them to change their mind. You have to help them destroy the actual misinformation itself that they previously intuited.”

The results have practical implications for editorial practices and public opinion, as debunking misinformation is an important scientific and public-policy goal, Albarracin said.

“Anything that triggers active participation in the audience – readership contributions, comments and debate, questions to the host of a show, and questioning of the information by the audience – would be more effective than even the most detailed countermessage,” Albarracin said.

“Ultimately, it’s the audience that needs to bring coherence to the new narrative.”

The paper will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

Albarracin’s co-authors are Man Pui Sally Chan, of the University of Illinois, and Christopher R. Jones and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, of The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration Center for Tobacco Products.

Editor’s notes: To contact Dolores Albarracin, call 217-244-7019; email dalbarra@illinois.edu.

The paper “Debunking: A meta-analysis of the psychological efficacy of messages countering misinformation” is available from the News Bureau.

Read Next

Uncategorized Portrait photos of, from left, Carl Bernacchi, Stephen Long and Donald Ort

Review: Heat-resilient crops are within reach — given enough time and money

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Laboratory and field experiments have repeatedly shown that modifying the process of photosynthesis or the physical characteristics of plants can make crops more resilient to hotter temperatures. Scientists can now alter the abundance or orientation of leaves, change leaf chemistry to improve heat tolerance and adjust key steps in the process of […]

Arts Diptych image of the book cover of "Natural Attachments" and a portrait of Pollyanna Rhee standing in front of greenery.

Book explores how ‘domestication’ of environmentalism limits who it protects

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The response to a 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, reveals how the modern environmental movement has been used to protect the interests of private homeowners, said a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher. Landscape architecture professor Pollyanna Rhee chronicled how affluent homeowners use what she calls “ownership environmentalism” […]

Agriculture Graduate student Andrea Jimena Valdés-Alvarado, left, and food science professor Elvira Gonzalez de Mejia standing in the Edward R. Madigan Laboratory holding samples of the legume pulses they used in the study.

Fermenting legume pulses boosts their antidiabetic, antioxidant properties

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Food scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign identified the optimal fermentation conditions for pulses ― the dried edible seeds of legumes ― that increased their antioxidant and antidiabetic properties and their soluble protein content. Using the bacteria Lactiplantibacillus plantarum 299v as the microorganism, the team fermented pulses obtained from varying concentrations […]

Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

507 E. Green St
MC-426
Champaign, IL 61820

Email: stratcom@illinois.edu

Phone (217) 333-5010