Knowing a false claim was retracted fails to lower Americans’ belief in it

Evidence

A study by Stephan Lewandowsky nicely illustrated this effect several years later. Steve and his colleagues asked around 900 people whether a number of statements about the Iraq War were true or false. Participants were recruited from countries that were allies in the war, including Australia and the United States, as well as countries such as Germany whose media coverage was consistently sceptical of the motives for the war. They asked about three categories of statements: some that were deemed true; some that were initially presented as true but subsequently retracted (for example, ‘Allied prisoners of war were executed by the Iraqis after being captured’); and others that were completely fictional. Participants were first asked to report on their memory of all statements in the study and whether they thought the statements were true or false. Later in the survey, people were presented with the same items again and asked how certain they were a particular claim had later been retracted. The main idea here is that if people are open to corrections of misinformation, then acknowledgement of having seen a retraction of a false claim should lead people to be less likely to rate false items as true. … The results – across all country samples – revealed that whether people thought a particular claim was true or not was strongly predicted by how well they recalled the initial claim. Remember that for the false items specifically, we would expect that knowledge of the retractions should matter so that people are less likely to endorse false statements for which they remembered having seen a retraction notice. Interestingly, this pattern was confirmed in all countries except the United States, where awareness of the retractions had no effect on participants’ truth ratings of the false claims. … This next finding is more suggestive. When asked about the motivations behind the war, US participants rated the ‘to destroy WMDs’ explanation as the most important reason, whereas this motive was of little importance for Australian and German respondents. In other words, Americans had a stronger prior motivation to latch on to the WMDs narrative, even in the face of explicit corrections. The take-away here is that not only does misinformation linger despite repeated corrections, it does so more easily when the misinformation fits with what people want to be true about the world. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 267

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the continued-influence effect / belief perseverance literature and Motivated Reasoning theory, e.g. Kunda 1990 and Nyhan & Reifler’s backfire effect. — connects to: People often resist or reverse belief updating rather than tracking evidence — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 104; People resist updating beliefs even at the cost of accuracy; People often distort evidence to fit preexisting worldviews rather than updating beliefs — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 108 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Why specifically the US sample? The author ties it to prior motivation around WMDs, but the country-level divergence invites a design check — were sample sizes comparable across countries?

Broader Connections

• People often resist or reverse belief updating rather than tracking evidence #corroborates (0.85) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 104
• Even disconfirmation evidence often fails to break a person’s confirmation bias #corroborates (0.82) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 94
• People resist updating beliefs even at the cost of accuracy #corroborates (0.80)
• Correcting false beliefs can strengthen them rather than reduce them #corroborates (0.80) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 350
• People often distort evidence to fit preexisting worldviews rather than updating beliefs #corroborates (0.75) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 108