Colleen M. Seifert

Misinformation and Its Correction Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing

The widespread prevalence and persistence of misinformation in contemporary societies, such as the false belief that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, is a matter of public concern. For example, the myths surrounding vaccinations, which prompted some parents to withhold immunization from their children, have led to a marked increase in vaccine-preventable disease, as well as unnecessary public expenditure on research and public-information campaigns aimed at rectifying the situation. We first examine the mechanisms by which such misinformation is disseminated in society, both inadvertently and purposely. Misinformation can originate from rumors but also from works of fiction, governments and politicians, and vested interests. Moreover, changes in the media landscape, including the arrival of the Internet, have fundamentally influenced the ways in which information is communicated and misinformation is spread. We next move to misinformation at the level of the individual, and review the cognitive factors that often render misinformation resistant to correction. We consider how people assess the truth of statements and what makes people believe certain things but not others. We look at people’s memory for misinformation and answer the questions of why retractions of misinformation are so ineffective in memory updating and why efforts to retract misinformation can even backfire and, ironically, increase misbelief. Though ideology and personal worldviews can be major obstacles for debiasing, there nonetheless are a number of effective techniques for reducing the impact of misinformation, and we pay special attention to these factors that aid in debiasing. We conclude by providing specific recommendations for the debunking of misinformation. These recommendations pertain to the ways in which corrections should be designed, structured, and applied in order to maximize their impact. Grounded in cognitive psychological theory, these recommendations may help practitioners—including journalists, health professionals, educators, and science communicators—design effective misinformation retractions, educational tools, and public-information campaigns.

Sources of the Continued Influence Effect: When Misinformation in Memory Affects Later Inferences

Several lines of research have found that information previously encoded into memory can influence inferences and judgments, even when more recent information discredits it. Previous theories have attributed this to difficulties in editing memory—failing to successfully trace out and alter inferences or explanations generated before a correction. However, in Experiments 1A and IB, Ss who had received an immediate correction made as many inferences based on misinformation as Ss who had received the correction later in the account (and presumably had made more inferences requiring editing.) In a 2nd experiment, the availability (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) of the misinformation within the comprehension context was tested. The results showed that Ss continued to make inferences involving discredited information when it afforded causal structure, but not when only incidentally mentioned or primed during an intervening task. Experiments 3A and 3B found that providing a plausible causal alternative, rather than simply negating misinformation, mitigated the effect. The findings suggest that misinformation can still influence inferences one generates after a correction has occurred; however, providing an alternative that replaces the causal structure it affords can reduce the effects of misinformation.

Updating accounts following a correction of misinformation.

The research examined whether corrected misinformation influences anaphoric inferences people make during subsequent reading. Participants read a set of corrected-misinformation and no-misinformation stories and made judgments about probe words that were either appropriate or inappropriate anaphoric referents. At a short delay, the results showed less activation for appropriate referents that were corrections of misinformation. At longer delays, the activation of appropriate referents showed no significant difference, but misinformation probes were more quickly recognized than were inappropriate referents that were incidentally mentioned in control story versions. In all conditions, appropriate referents showed more activation than inappropriate ones. The results suggest that corrected misinformation can continue to influence on-line reading processes.

Memory for impasses during problem solving

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the relative memorability of solved versus unsolved problems in long-term memory. In each experiment, subjects worked on a set of potentially solvable word problems, with the time spent on each problem held constant. Problem memorability was then measured with a free-recall task. In Experiment 1, in which a majority of problems were solved, unsolved problems were better remembered. In Experiments 2 and 3, we expanded on these results by manipulating problem difficulty and thus the ratio of solved to unsolved problems. When unsolved problems were as frequent as or more frequent than solved problems, no memory differences were found. Across all three experiments, the ratio of solved to unsolved problems was found to be a significant predictor of unsolved-problem memorability, but was not significantly related to the memorability of solved problems. The results illustrate that when impasses in problem solving are infrequent, they are more available in memory than are solved problems. It is speculated that this memory phenomenon may facilitate the recognition of opportunities to return to problems that have been terminated short of solution.

Making the Connection: Generalized Knowledge Structures in Story Understanding

Six experiments examined the connections in memory between two stories describing the same action sequence. The action sequences represented script-like MOP structures such as eating at a restaurant, like those proposed by Schank (1982. Dynamic memory: A theory of reminding and learning in computers andpeople. New York: Cambridge University Press). In the experimental procedure, subjects read a long list of stories, and then, after reading all the stories, they were presented with a list of phrases for which they were required to make old/new recognition judgments. Connections among the stories in memory were examined with pairs of phrases placed in the test list such that a priming phrase immediately preceded a target phrase. When a priming phrase was from the same story as its target phrase, responses to the target were facilitated. When a priming phrase was from another story of the same MOP as the target, responses were facilitated only if the test phrases were related to the MOP; there was no significant facilitation if the test phrases were not related to the MOP. In the case where the phrases were related to the MOP, there was as much facilitation when the phrases were from different stories as when they were from the same story. These results are shown to contradict previously proposed models of memory for script-like se

Enhancing Intrinsic Motivation in Health Promotion and Wellness

Health promotion and wellness specialists have long held this belief: ‘‘If you build a wellness program to help people lead healthier lives, they will come.’’ And why wouldn’t they? Start with completing a health risk assessment (HRA) and possibly biometric screening; the process alone can potentially be lifesaving, alerting people with conditions such as high cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes to the significant risk of these conditions. Similarly, the HRA can help identify predisposition to deadly diseases, such as cancer, that require immediate intervention. Who would not want to know the results of such an important assessment? Wellness interventions such as HRAs can build awareness, lead employees towards making better health decisions, and reduce companies’ ever-increasing health care costs. So why aren’t employees participating in large numbers in worksite wellness programs? From our general experience with wellness programs, we’ve seen that offering employees opportunities to improve health is simply not enough to cause them to use it. Despite the significant personal advantages from health promotion and wellness programs, many people still do not actively participate. To build intrinsic motivation for change, we believe that individuals need todiscover their own rewards forhealthybehavior.Employeesmust be supported within an organizational health culture to build their own goals, enhance their own knowledge, and follow through on their own concrete action steps. Through this health culture, employees can develop their own intrinsic values or incentives that help maintain their efforts towards achieving health goals. This article reviews scientific studiesofbehaviorchange thatprovideadeeperunderstandingofhuman motivation. The issues raised address how to design more effective health promotion and wellness programs, and illustrate ways to implement health change programs so that they enhance intrinsic motivation. To help us accomplish this we will be addressing the following topics:

A Comparison of Cognitive Heuristics Use between Engineers and Industrial Designers

The present study focuses on an exploration and identification of design heuristics used in the ideation process in both industrial designers and engineering designers. Design heuristics are cognitive strategies that help the designer generate novel design concepts. These cognitive heuristics may differ based on the design problem, the context defined, and designers’ preferences.

Opportunism in Memory: Preparing for Chance Encounters

Recognizing opportunities to achieve pending goals is an important cognitive ability. But when and how do we recognize that a current situation is especially suited to resuming a past goal? The predictive encoding model suggests pending goals are encoded into memory in association with anticipated environmental features. Optimally, these features are (a) necessary for successful goal satisfaction, (b) distinctive preconditions for expecting a plan to achieve the goal, and (c) described so as to be readily identified in the environment. Later, ordinary perception of features in the environment leads to automatic recognition of opportunities already prepared in memory. Evidence from experimental studies supports this theory, and demonstrates that general preparation can produce apparently novel opportunism. These findings suggest ways to facilitate the recognition of opportunities to satisfy pending goals.

Opportunism and Learning

There is a tension in the world between complexity and simplicity. On one hand, we are faced with a richness of environment and experience that is at times overwhelming. On the other, we seem to be able to cope and even thrive within this complexity through the use of simple scripts, stereotypical judgements, and habitual behaviors. In order to function in the world, we have idealized and simplified it in a way that makes reasoning about it more tractable. As a group and as individuals, human agents search for and create islands of simplicity and stability within a sea of complexity and change.In this article, we will discuss an approach based on the case-based reasoning paradigm that attempts to resolve this tension. This agency approach embraces, rather than avoids, this paradox of the apparent complexity of the world and the overall simplicity of our methods for dealing with it. It accomplishes this by treating the behavior of intelligent agents as an ongoing attempt to discover, create, and maintain the stability that is necessary for the production of actions that satisfy our goals.

Case-Based Learning: Predictive Features in Indexing

Interest in psychological experimentation from the Artificial Intelligence community often takes the form of rigorous post-hoc evaluation of completed computer models. Through an example of our own collaborative research, we advocate a different view of how psychology and AI may be mutually relevant, and propose an integrated approach to the study of learning in humans and machines. We begin with the problem of learning appropriate indices for storing and retrieving information from memory. From a planning task perspective, the most useful indices may be those that predict potential problems and access relevant plans in memory, improving the planners ability to predict and avoid planning failures. This “predictive features” hypothesis is then supported as a psychological claim, with results showing that such features offer an advantage in terms of the selectivity of reminding because they more distinctively characterize planning situations where differing plans are appropriate.We present a specific case-based model of plan execution,Runner, along with its indices for recognizing when to select particular plans—appropriateness conditions—and how these predictive indices serve to enhance learning. We then discuss how this predictive features claim as implemented in theRunner model is then tested in a second set of psychological studies. The results show that learning appropriateness conditions results in greater success in recognizing when a past plan is in fact relevant in current processing, and produces more reliable recall of the related information. This form of collaboration has resulted in a unique integration of computational and empirical efforts to create a model of case-based learning.