Correcting vaccine misinformation: A failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects.

ABSTRACT: Individuals often continue to rely on misinformation in their reasoning and decision making even after it has been corrected. This is known as the continued influence effect, and one of its presumed drivers is misinformation familiarity. As continued influence can promote misguided or unsafe behaviours, it is important to find ways to minimize the effect by designing more effective corrections. It has been argued that correction effectiveness is reduced if the correction repeats the to-be-debunked misinformation, thereby boosting its familiarity. Some have even suggested that this familiarity boost may cause a correction to inadvertently increase subsequent misinformation reliance; a phenomenon termed the familiarity backfire effect. A study by Pluviano et al. (2017) found evidence for thi

SUBMITTER: Ecker UKH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10096191 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature