Emotion contributes to the continued influence effect of misinformation

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

News reports on ongoing events inevitably involve corrections to previously mistaken pieces of information in line with changing circumstances. However, people continue to rely on discredited information from previous reporting when answering inference questions, even with clear remembering of the corrected information—a phenomenon known as the continued-influence effect of misinformation. Given that the cause of the CIEM is competing retrieval, a “reminding-based approach” to competing retrieval may be able to produce a new solution to the CIEM. In addition, previous research suggested that there is a lower reliance on explicitly stated misinformation than implied misinformation owing to the higher degree of activation of the recursive reminding mechanism. The current study assumed that this cognitive mechanism may be influenced by the affect-as-information hypothesis, and examined the impact of various affective conditions on the continued-influence effect of misinformation to identify effective correction strategies. Section 1 aimed to measure the impact of affective conditions and misinformation type on the CIEM to identify whether the recursive reminding is facilitated by affect-as-information; and Section 1 confirmed that the continued-influence effect of misinformation is partially influenced by the affect-as-information hypothesis. Section 2 manipulated news chatbot agent’s remarks (Experiment 3) and emojis (Experiment 4) to examine whether the findings of Section 1 can also apply to real life circumstance. Section 2 revealed that news chatbot agent’s neutral remarks and a positive emoji alleviate the continued-influence effect of misinformation. Potential reasons for these findings are discussed along with proposals for future research.