Beliefs trump facts: Effect of Frequent Corrections on Misinformation Beliefs during Extended Extreme Events

• Published in: ACM transactions on social computing 2024-12, Vol.7 (1-4), p.1-31
• Main Authors: Nandakumar, Archana, Rajivan, Prashanth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied computing; Experimentation; General and reference; Human-centered computing; Hypothesis testing and confidence interval computation; Information systems; Laboratory experiments; Mathematics of computing; Psychology; Security and privacy; Social aspects of security and privacy; Social networks
• ISSN: 2469-7818; 2469-7826
• DOI: 10.1145/3688598

Providing corrections to people who have engaged with false claims in Online Social Networks (OSN) is a form of cognitive intervention employed to address the spread of misinformation. Although there is a large body of work that has studied the effectiveness of corrections for promoting accurate beliefs, there is still much uncertainty around the precise effects of corrections on individuals’ behaviors in OSNs. Notably, the effect of offering frequent corrections on discerning information and identifying misinformation remains uncertain. We conducted two laboratory experiments to test whether experiencing frequent corrections to misinformation improved peoples’ ability to discriminate between true and false news claims during extended extreme events like the COVID-19 pandemic. All participants recruited for the experiments were from USA. They received corrections at varying frequencies, depending on their assigned experimental condition. Results from both experiments suggest that increasing frequency of corrections may not affect people’s ability to correctly assess information (or misinformation). Participant’s beliefs (vaccine hesitancy, belief in mask effectiveness, and trust in fact-checking organization) were found to be the most significant contributing factors to the ability to learn from corrections. We discuss the implications of the findings from these experiments.