Posted: September 7th, 2024

The Role of Familiarity in Misinformation

Literature Review: The Role of Familiarity in Misinformation

Effects of Misinformation
Chan et al. (2017) argue that information that appears or is thought to have been true but later turns out incorrect can affect how people think or make decisions even after this misinformation has been corrected by credible sources when people remember and understand this correction. According to Chan and his colleagues, the overall effects of misinformation have been an area of key interest to psychologists because of the concerns that it can affect individual voting decisions and health behaviors. Chan gives the example of the rumor that the Zika Virus outbreak across Brazil resulted from genetically modified mosquitos was a claim that was any scientific evidence did not support that. Given that misinformation can result in poor decision-making regarding consequential matters and difficult to correct, Chan et al. (2017) argue that understanding it is a crucial public policy and scientific goal.
In another study, Berinsky (2015) argues that refuting rumors through relying on statements emerging from unlikely sources has the potential to increase a society’s willingness to reject the rumors regardless of the political predictions made. The study further suggests that a given rumor’s source credibility can be a very effective tool for dispelling political rumors. Leveraging on research from psychology, particularly regarding fluency, Berinsky’s (2015) study suggests that rumors tend to acquire more power through the concept of familiarity. In other words, any attempt to quash any rumors through the act of direct refutation has the potential to facilitate the diffusion of these rumors by increasing fluency. Based on Berinsky (2015) study, we can conclude that simply repeating a specific rumor has the potential to increase its power,
Continued acts of misinformation can undermine well-functioning democracies. For instance, Cook, Lewandowsky, and Ecker (2017) suggest that public misconceptions regarding climate change can lower acceptance of climatic changes’ reality and effects and lower the support of potential mitigation policies. Cook, Lewandowsky, and Ecker (2017) study explored the overall impact of information on climate change to establish the measures that can be adopted to reduce the influence that this misinformation can have on efforts to remedy climate change. The study managed to establish that biased media coverage and misinformation lowered perceived consensus, with the impact being more among free-market supporters. The study established that inoculating messages explaining flawed argumentation techniques applied in misinformation effectively neutralized the adverse effects associated with misinformation. This study recommends that appropriate climate communication messages consider the approach to distort scientific content and engage preemptive inoculation messages.
Familiarity’s Role in Misinformation
People tend to believe or rely on certain information even in situations where it has already been retracted in a phenomenon Ecker, Hogan, and Lewandowsky (2017) describes as continued influence miscommunication effect. Retractions tend to be defective due to several factors: repeating information, especially during corrections, can inadvertently strengthen, leading to the misinformation being strengthened by ensuring that it becomes more familiar. As such, practitioners should design corrections that can avoid misinformation repetition. Ecker, Hogan, and Lewandowsky’s (2017) study aimed to investigate this approach by establishing whether retractions are effective when repetitions and reminders of the original misinformation are included. The study’s findings were that retractions tend to vary in the extent or how they serve as misinformation reminders. On the other hand, retractions that repeated the misinformation appeared to be more effective in minimizing the effects of the misinformation than retractions that were avoidant of the repetition to enhance salience. Based on this understanding, debunking effective myth must be revised to minimize misinformation effects.
Some studies have suggested that people’s inability to refresh or update their memories, particularly where collective information is involved, leads to significant public health consequences. Pluviano, Watt, and Della Sala’s (2017) study attempt to investigate this fact by comparing three strategies that could potentially promote a vaccine, with one approach being a myth and another one a fact. The study sought to investigate the beliefs in the autisms and vaccine link, its side effects, and the intentions to ensure that future children are vaccinated. This research demonstrated that the existing strategies used to correct vaccine misinformation often backfire and are ineffective, leading to unintended opposite effects and reducing specific vaccines’ intentions. From Pluviano, Watt, and Della Sala’s (2017) study, we can conclude that misinformation can lead to significant public health consequences.
The Role of Technology in Promoting Familiarity in Misinformation
With the advent of information technology, particularly social media, people routinely come across inaccurate information emanating from various fake news sources that are meant to confuse their target audiences or fake stories designed to entertain readers. Under such circumstances, the hope would be these tendencies or inaccuracies are ignored, leading to very little influence on our actions or thoughts. Unfortunately, Rapp and Salovich (2018) explain that exposure to such inaccuracies can lead to very problematic outcomes and consequences. Reading inaccurate statements often results in readers exhibiting clear effects of such contents, particularly their problem-solving skills or decision-making process. Such occurrences tend to happen even when the audience already has the right prior knowledge to reject or evaluate the existing inaccuracies. Exposure to these misinformation types tends to confuse what is true while also doubting any accurate understandings or subsequent reliance on manufactured falsehoods. As such, the study recommends that technologies and interventions designed to address such effects should encourage critical evaluation that can support effective learning and comprehension.
Finally, piecemeal reporting of occurring news events can lead to misinformation about such events that would later have to be corrected. Rich and Zaragoza (2016) argue that studies on continued influence effect demonstrate that corrections aren’t effective in reversing the effects of misinformation. In most cases, participants usually continue to leverage information that is already discredited when seeking to make judgments or draw inferences about a specific news item. To establish this fact, Rich and Zaragoza (2016) studied two experiments where the first one established that corrections often reduce reliance on misinformation in both implied and explicit conditions. However, the correction tends to be less effective where implied misinformation is involved. The second experiment demonstrated that misinformation tends to more resistant to any form of correction compared to explicit misinformation. Based on these findings, we can conclude that corrections aren’t effective in reversing the effects of misinformation. Participants usually continue to leverage information that is already discredited when seeking to make judgments or draw inferences about a specific news item.

Limitations
The limitations to the current research study is the fact that there is little prior research on the role of familiarity in misinformation, which means that the study has had to develop a new research topology leveraging on the little research studies available.
Another limitation is that the current study is affected by conflict from cultural and personal biases. The study relies on the opinion of individuals from different cultural perspective or backgrounds to understand the role of familiarity in misinformation, and it I an issue that affects the overall legitimacy of this study. .
Hypothesis
Familiarity to any information or knowledge doesn’t help in demystifying the misinformation.
Variables
In this study;
The independent variable will be Familiarity to information
The dependent variable will be misinformation

References
Berinsky, A. J. (2015). Rumors and health care reform: Experiments in political misinformation. British Journal of Political Science, 47(2), 241-262. doi:10.1017/s0007123415000186
Chan, M. S., Jones, C. R., Hall Jamieson, K., & Albarracín, D. (2017). Debunking: A meta-analysis of the psychological efficacy of messages countering misinformation. Psychological Science, 28(11), 1531-1546. doi:10.1177/0956797617714579
Cook, J., Lewandowsky, S., & Ecker, U. K. (2017). Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence. PLOS ONE, 12(5), e0175799. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0175799
Ecker, U. K., Hogan, J. L., & Lewandowsky, S. (2017). Reminders and repetition of misinformation: Helping or hindering its retraction? Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(2), 185-192. doi:10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.01.014
Pluviano, S., Watt, C., & Della Sala, S. (2017). Misinformation lingers in memory: Failure of three pro-vaccination strategies. PLOS ONE, 12(7), e0181640. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0181640
Rapp, D. N., & Salovich, N. A. (2018). Can’t we just disregard fake news? The consequences of exposure to inaccurate information. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5(2), 232-239. doi:10.1177/2372732218785193
Rich, P. R., & Zaragoza, M. S. (2016). The continued influence of implied and explicitly stated misinformation in news reports. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(1), 62-74. doi:10.1037/xlm0000155

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