u02a01 Misinformation Literature Review

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Running head: Misinformation Literature Review 1 Misinformation Literature Review Stephen Scott Research Methods in Psychology Literature Review Capella University February 2, 2020

Misinformation Literature Review 2 Misinformation Literature Review Throughout history humans have shown they are susceptible to creating memories from misinformation. This trend has only increased as modern technology has allowed the spread of information instantly throughout the world by accessing the internet and social media. It’s important to review recent studies showing how misinformation affects society. For this literature review, the Capella library was used to research articles that conduct experiments on misinformation. This paper will look at how effective each of these were research experiments were on explaining how misinformation affects the memory. Also, based on the results of this review the paper will develop a hypothesis on the techniques of these experiments and how they could be related to the topic of whether a connection exists or not between vaccines and autism. Rumors and Health Care Reform: Experiments in Political Misinformation In society, political misinformation is one of the most challenging for researchers to correct. In a recent study, researchers conducted two simultaneous studies to look at how to remedy false memories that are created from political rumors (Berinsky, 2017). The first study focused on showing that revisions from an improbable source, such as having a credible Republican politician debunk political rumors that are important to democrats can be effective in removing that false information from memory. The study consisted of 1701 adults in the US that completed a survey with only 699 of those being chosen after it was determined they correctly read the instructions and answered the questions correctly. They were put into one of four different rumor conditions that focused on a debate over how elderly people would be treated after the passage of the affordable care act. There was a rumor that there would be a death panel for elderly people after the affordable care act was passed. The second study looked at fluency from the first study and put respondents into three separate rumor conditions. The results of the

Misinformation Literature Review 3 study found that if rumors are refuted by politicians that are opposite than their individual and political interests. The study shows that under the right conditions that people can learn new memories that correct the false political information. The limits to the study are the sample size and how diverse the population was. The study did not show a breakdown of ethnicity, gender, age, or social economic status to show that this study is representative of the US population. Can’t We Just Disregard Fake News? The Consequences of Exposure to Inaccurate Information Throughout the US, people are able to access data from the past, new facts and stories, quickly be in contact with anyone throughout the world, and they are routinely exposed to information that in incorrect that people may or may not be aware of (Rapp, & Salovich, 2018). Studies show that it can be challenging to combat misinformation because even when people have correct knowledge they can still be swayed to believe in misinformation. The three primary concerns to encoding incorrect information into memory are confusion, doubt, and reliance. Looking at how these three factors influence memory can lead to new interventions to combat this. Researchers found that having participants practice assessing the information they were reading can limit the impact of false information on encoding into memory. They had participants read through a text and motivate them to correct anything that was deemed to be incorrect based on prior knowledge. The challenge with this proactive activity is how to encourage people to conduct these evaluations during each new presented piece of information. One idea has shown that the creation of an app that guides a person to evaluate new information could help to ensure misinformation is not encoded into memory. This study shows that people can employ techniques to minimize encoding misinformation into memory. The studies

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Misinformation Literature Review 4 credibility can be question because it does not include a population that was sampled to come up with these results. Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence When people in society accept misinformation as truth when it is not, it can lead to dangerous outcomes for society (Cook, Lewandowsky, & Ecker, 2017). One example of this was during the years of 2000 through 2005, the people of South Africa experienced an increase of 330,000 in AIDS related deaths because of policies that rejected the scientific information of HIV causing AIDS. One way that researchers have found to combat this is to use inoculation theory. Inoculation theory suggests that people can be protected against encoding misinformation into memory by exposing them to contradictory information before they are exposed to misinformation. To test this theory researchers used Qualtrics.com to enroll 714 participants chosen by gender, age, and socioeconomic status. These recruits were randomly assigned to one of five groups discussing an article on climate change that included a control, and four groups on misinformation that were divided by those who look at consensus info, inoculation info, both consensus info and inoculation info, and one that had no message. The results found that when false balance media articles are utilized people are less likely to believe in the information of climate change studies. They found that using inoculation techniques could effectively decrease the effect that were created by the false-balance media coverage. This study shows a diversity in the sample that was gathered from the population. Using this type of random sampling could increase the probability of this study reflecting the general population. Misinformation lingers in memory: Failure of three pro-vaccination strategies

Misinformation Literature Review 5 One area of research that has felt the impact of misinformation is vaccinations for children. Studies show that vaccinations are safe for the public to prevent them from contracting infectious diseases (Pluviano, Watt, & Sergio, 2017). There are still people in the US that believe that vaccinations are dangerous because they rely on misinformation. Research on memory for inferences shows that is can be challenging to fix relying on misinformation about vaccines, even when they are presented with scientific data that shows they are safe. In a current study, researchers looked at how well different strategies worked on promoting vaccinations in children. They recruited 120 total participants using convenience sampling through emails to graduate level students at Universities in Edinburg and Naples. The average age of students was 25 consisting of both male and females. The study broke the students into four groups the control, fear correction, visual correction, and myths vs. facts correction and had them take survey rating from 1 to 5 how they felt about vaccines causing autism, if vaccinations have side effects, and how likely people were to vaccinate their children. The results of this study proved that current campaigns to address vaccination misinformation were not unsuccessful and were likely to fail. This was due to the message having an opposite result on vaccination beliefs, could possibly strengthen misinformation beliefs and cause less desire to vaccinate children. This study could be improved by drawing from a larger population that is more diverse than the students of Edinburgh and Naples University. Also, the sampling should be conducted randomly to ensure a higher probability that this study will reflect the population. Reducing the Misinformation Effect Through Initial Testing: Take Two Tests and Recall Me in the Morning? Its important for researcher to study memory and how to improve it. This can also be useful in fixing memories created by misinformation (Huff, Weinsheimer, & Bodner, 2016).

Misinformation Literature Review 6 Researchers wanted to look at how testing could create protection for later misinformation. The study consisted of 216 undergraduates from the University of Calgary, who participated for course credit. They were asked to describe scenes from houses either 0, 1, or 2 times immediately or once 48 hours were passed. Then they took another test consisting of household items exposed either 0, 1, or 4 times by social contagion manipulation where the student evaluated sets of recall test that were created by other students. The results showed that there was evidence of the testing creating a protection against misinformation but taking an additional test did create more of a protection against misinformation. This study could be improved by having random sampling from a larger population to ensure diversity and to be more representative of the entire population not just undergraduates from one school. Sleep Increases Susceptibility to the Misinformation Effect Many studies have shown that sleep and memory are connected (Calvillo et al., 2016). Researchers wanted to test how sleep interacted with eyewitnesses being subjected to misleading information after an event occurs creating a false memory due to the misinformation effect. The study consisted of 177 students that were required to complete study for credit in their college course at a university in California. These students were broken in to groups and required to watch two separate scenes and were either shown misleading post event info right after the scene, 12 hours after they saw it, 12 hours after on the following day, or 24 hours after the scene, and then completed a recognition test. The results showed that every student suffered from misinformation effect, but those that sleep in between retained more misinformation. This study shows that sleep can increase the misinformation effect. Researchers could improve on these results by gathering a random sample from a larger population to increase probability of representing the population accurately.

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Misinformation Literature Review 7 Psychophysiological correlates of the misinformation effect It’s important to study how psychophysiological aspects of memory creation and recall with misinformation. A current study recruited 75 students through student services and bulletins around the campus. They viewed a movie that showed nine random specifics, were given 10 minutes to retain the memories from it, and then they would recite the written words to the movie. During the movie, 6 out of 9 facts were changed to misinforming details. Then they had to finish a test on recall on three of the unique items, while having their vital recorded through a concealed information test, to determine truthfulness of their answers. The study showed that they were not able to reduce misinformation effects through cued recall. They might be able to increase the accuracy of this study by increasing the sample size and conducting random sampling. Research Topic and Hypothesis The topic that I chose to relate this literature review to was false balance. This topic deals with misinformation and how it relates to the safety of immunizations through two summaries dealing with immunizations. The first is called Consensus Information and talked about how the data on immunizations of thousands of Danish children over eleven years showed no direct link between MMR vaccination and Autism. The second article is called Experimental Condition and talks about how a government vaccine court ruled that MMR vaccine do cause autism. It also talked about how a boy was awarded money after winning a case for MMR vaccine causing his autism. It talks about how the government is hiding something on the case. Based on these two articles and the information that was gathered in the literature reviews it can be determined that misinformation on inoculation’s is more easily encoded into memory than facts . Will listening to music of varying tempos affect the encoding of false information on

Misinformation Literature Review 8 immunizations for children? I hypothesis that listening to music at a fast tempo will increase the chance of participants encoding the facts about immunizing children versus misinformation about immunizing children and change their beliefs from initial pre-test questionnaire to post-test questionnaire to be more in favor of immunizing children. Research has shown that slow tempo music can cause more false memory recall than fast tempo music (Kamall, & Berry, 2015). The psychological theory that can best explain human behavior of why misinformation is more easily encoded than facts is fuzzy trace theory. Fuzzy Trace Theory Fuzzy trace theory has been used for many years in experiments by researchers to help explain how misinformation can be encoded into memory. Fuzzy trace theory shows that when a person is shown important information, two different versions of the information are encoded into memory, an exact account of the information and one or more gist accounts of the information (Blalock, & Reyna, 2016). The exact accounts of the information are summarizes the exact, words, numbers, or images that are involved in the stimulus into memory and the gist accounts of the information only encodes basic information or can remember only the information that stood out to them. For example, if a statistic is shown that surgery can lead to a two percent risk of a patient having a stroke, a person may make a gist memory that there is no risk for them to have surgery and this can lead to a challenge in getting their consent to have the surgery. They may also remember the two percent risk of stroke as a much larger number and this will lead to a gist memory that show surgery is much more dangerous than the facts provided. Research shows that gist reasoning can be effective if an expert with extensive

Misinformation Literature Review 9 knowledge of the subject is reviewing the factual data. This research shows why gist retrieval of information that a person is not an expert in can be misleading and incorrect for them to believe. Summary and Conclusion In conclusion, misinformation is something that affects society and there is a need for more studies to learn how to properly defend against it creating false memories in society. The literature review showed that there is extensive information on misinformation being able to create false memories. It showed that there are several techniques that can be utilized to minimize misinformation being recalled rather than facts. For example, political misinformation retractions are more effective if they come from the politicians with opposing view and opinions rather than similar views and opinions. Each of these studies except one suffered from a limited sample that was not randomly gathered to increase the probability to produce diverse results that represent the population. The studies show similarities with how misinformation can be easier to encode into memory than facts. Furthermore, research shows that more information can be gained by replicating these studies and utilizing true experimental design.

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Misinformation Literature Review 10 References Berinsky, A. J. (2017). Rumors and health care reform: Experiments in political misinformation. British Journal of Political Science, 47 (2), 241-262. doi:http://dx.doi.org.library.capella.edu/10.1017/S0007123415000186 Blalock, S. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2016). Using fuzzy-trace theory to understand and improve health judgments, decisions, and behaviors: A literature review. Health Psychology : Official Journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, 35 (8), 781-792. doi:10.1037/hea0000384 Calvillo, D. P., Parong, J. A., Peralta, B., Ocampo, D., & Van Gundy, R. (2016). Sleep increases susceptibility to the misinformation effect: Sleep and the misinformation effect. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 30 (6), 1061-1067. doi:10.1002/acp.3259 Cook, J., Lewandowsky, S., & Ecker, U. K. H. (2017). Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence. PLoS One, 12 (5) doi:http://dx.doi.org.library.capella.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0175799 Huff, M. J., Weinsheimer, C. C., & Bodner, G. E. (2016). Reducing the misinformation effect through initial testing: Take two tests and recall me in the morning? Protecting memory from misinformation. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 30 (1), 61-69. doi:10.1002/acp.3167 Kamall, A., & Berry, D. (2015). Effects of music genre and music tempo on false memory formation. Asian Journal of Natural & Applied Sciences . Retrieved From: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3094/4141be1c861c7d40a00dcb2e4ba4143c416a.pdf

Misinformation Literature Review 11 Pluviano, S., Watt, C., & Sergio, D. S. (2017). Misinformation lingers in memory: Failure of three pro-vaccination strategies. PLoS One, 12 (7) doi:http://dx.doi.org.library.capella.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0181640 Rapp, D. N., & Salovich, N. A. (2018). Can’t we just disregard fake news? the consequences of exposure to inaccurate information. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5 (2), 232-239. doi:10.1177/2372732218785193 Volz, K., Leonhart, R., Stark, R., Vaitl, D., & Ambach, W. (2017). Psychophysiological correlates of the misinformation effect. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 117 , 1-9. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2017.04.004

u02a01 Misinformation Literature Review

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