Abstract
Although interest in the efficacy of efforts to correct false beliefs has peaked in recent years, the extent to which corrective effects endure over time remains understudied. Drawing on insights from related literatures in the psychology of belief, persuasion and media effects to inform theoretical expectations, this study uses a longitudinal experiment to observe both contemporaneous and long-term changes in participants’ belief accuracy in response to corrective information within an ongoing, contentious political debate. We measured factors thought to either promote durability (e.g. repeated exposure to corrective information) or cause decay (e.g. political predispositions, media behaviors) in assessing moderators of the magnitude and longevity of corrections. Corrective effects were found to be quite durable, detectable up to 4 weeks after exposure to the initial message, while repeated exposure to corrective information further promoted the longevity of these effects.
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Notes
Full data and replication files are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Z6YXV0.
While this approach allows for detection of more subtle changes in belief accuracy in response to corrective messages, we acknowledge that existing definitions of what it means to be misinformed emphasize the importance of confidence (e.g. Kuklinski et al. 2000, Pasek et al. 2015). For this reason, we estimated additional models that utilized a follow-up question asking participants how certain they were in their beliefs to restrict our sample to only those who expressed some degree of confidence in their belief. Results were consistent with those reported here and are presented in the online supplementary file.
There was some evidence that attrition influenced which participants received the corrective message at Wave 2, as pre-test immigration attitudes, age and identification as Latino were all associated with assignment to the correction treatment. To account for the possibility these patterns in attrition influenced any observed effects, we estimated additional models that restricted our sample to only those participants who completed all three waves of the study. The results are substantively similar to those displayed below. Full reporting of these results are included in the Online Supplemental Appendix.
Full reporting of these results are included in the online supplemental appendix.
The estimates were plotted using the coefplot command in Stata (Jann, 2014).
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Carnahan, D., Bergan, D.E. & Lee, S. Do Corrective Effects Last? Results from a Longitudinal Experiment on Beliefs Toward Immigration in the U.S.. Polit Behav 43, 1227–1246 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09591-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09591-9