Abstract. From politics to the market place and work place, people often endorse beliefs that lack factual support. Worse, misinformation is notoriously difficult to correct and correction efforts may even backfire. This is the case because correction attempts typically rely on analytic processing and ignore the role of intuitive processing. In most cases, people rely on a subset of five criteria in evaluating truth: Is it compatible with other things I believe? Is it internally consistent? Does it tell a plausible story? Does it come from a credible source? Are there many supporting arguments? Do others think so as well? Each criterion can be evaluated by drawing on relevant details (an effortful analytic strategy) or by attending to the ease with which the content can be processed (a less effortful intuitive strategy). Most correction attempts confront misleading statements with facts. This works as long as the facts are highly accessible. But it backfires after a delay because it ignores the downstream consequences for intuitive truth assessments: Extensive thought about the misinformation at the correction phase increases fluent processing when the misinformation is re-encountered at a later time. Fluent processing, however, is central to intuitive judgments of truth and facilitates acceptance under all criteria. An alternative strategy takes advantage of feelings of suspicion, which enhance analytic processing. Inducing distrust through priming procedures or eliciting suspicion through embodied cues attenuates the acceptance of misleading information and enhances analytic reasoning. I present select experiments from this research program, highlight the role of feelings in evaluations of truth, and discuss theoretical and applied implications.
This is an overview talk. Some related papers are:
Schwarz, N., Newman, E., & Leach, W. (in press). Making the truth stick and the myths fade: Lessons from cognitive psychology. Behavioral Science & Policy (pdf)
Schwarz, N (2015). Metacognition. In M. Mikulincer, P.R. Shaver, E. Borgida, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition (pp. 203-229). Washington, DC: APA. (pdf)
Lee, D.S., Kim, E., & Schwarz, N. (2015). Something smells fishy: Olfactory suspicion cues improve performance on the Moses illusion and Wason rule generation task. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 59, 47-50. [pdf]
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13, 106-131. -- DOI 10.1177/1529100612451018 (pdf)