A new study clarifies when attempts to debunk misinformation about science are most likely to work.
Social psychologists and communication scholars Man-pui Sally Chan and Dolores Albarracín of the University of Pennsylvania conducted the meta-analysis, a quantitative synthesis of prior research, which involved 60,000 participants in 74 experiments. Each experiment either assessed belief in misinformation about science or introduced misinformation about science as accurate and then introduced corrections for the misinformation.
“It’s more than twice as hard to debunk polarized misinformation than it is to correct non-polarized misinformation.”
Although on average the corrections failed to accomplish their objectives, they worked better when the issue in the correction was emotionally more positive than the misinformation, the correction matched the ideology of the recipients, the issue was not politically polarized, and the correction provided abundant details as to why the earlier claims were false.
The researchers found that “attempts to debunk science-relevant misinformation were, on average, not successful,” says Chan, the lead author of the paper in Nature Human Behaviour and a research associate at the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn. “Therefore, most of the science-relevant misinformation goes uncorrected even when a debunk is presented. People believe in the misinformation as much before as after the debunk. This is quite notable, because corrections in other domains, such as reports about an accident or political event, do reasonably well, as shown by past research. However, this does not occur in the domain of misinformation about science.”
The researchers conducted their study with two goals in mind. The first was gauging whether the misinformation can be corrected; the second was determining which types of corrections fare better than others.
To achieve those goals, the team began by figuring out whether negative or neutral misinformation is easier to correct. Their investigation confirmed that positive misinformation, which makes people “feel good about themselves, their future, or the world more generally,” the study says, is more challenging to correct than negative misinformation.
“We humans like to keep our rose-tinted glasses on, and we are resistant to debunking pseudoscience that feels good,” says Albarracín, professor and director of the Science of Science Communication division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “It is far easier to correct hype about a chemical spill that didn’t happen than about deforestation that is happening. The reason is that it’s more pleasant to move from pessimistic to optimistic news rather than the other way around.” Good news corrects negative misinformation more easily than bad news corrects positive misinformation, she says.
The researchers also asked what corrective messages are most successful. They found that when a correction offers a detailed explanation, the audience is more likely to be receptive, and the misinformation is more likely to be debunked. The process through which this occurs involves two stages. First, the particulars and information in the correction offer the respondent a new model through which to understand the event described in the misinformation. Then, this new representation of what produced the event replaces the initial model created by the misinformation.
Chan and Albarracín also examined whether an individual’s attitudes or beliefs “affect the success of corrections of science-relevant misinformation.” They found that when the debunking contradicts people’s ideology, recipients are more likely to reject the correction and reinforce their support for the misinformation. So, for example, a person with a left-leaning ideology is disposed to accept a correction of claims opposing climate change. In contrast, when the debunking contradicts people’s ideology, recipients are more likely to reject the correction and reinforce their support for the misinformation.
Another important factor is political polarization around the scientific issue under discussion. The study found that when a topic is polarized, as, for example, COVID-19 vaccination, the correction often fails. “It’s more than twice as hard to debunk polarized misinformation than it is to correct non-polarized misinformation,” Albarracín says.
There are, however, ways to correct misinformation. Once you account for obstacles, it’s possible to work around them. Chan recommends “using corrections that are detailed, increasing familiarity with the topic in the audience, making discussions of science not about politics to depolarize them. But if the topic is already politically polarized, then the correction must be written in a way that aligns with the recipient’s politics.”
Source: Penn
