Why Misinformation Is Appealing

By Mark W. Susmann and Duane T. Wegener.

Source: memyselfaneye/Pixabay

In recent months, it has become commonplace to see reporting about individuals, such as Samantha Wendell, who tragically died from COVID-19 after refusing vaccination due to antivaccine misinformation. With growing numbers of such stories, the potentially lethal consequences of misinformation become increasingly clear.

Misinformation about COVID-19 has contributed to higher case and death rates. A vexing question is how these consequences have unfolded despite widespread efforts to correct the misinformation. Governmental, media, and academic outlets have all repeatedly debunked COVID-19 misinformation as it arises, yet belief in such misinformation remains.

Why Do Corrections of Misinformation Often Fail?

The fact that belief in misinformation can persist after it has been corrected has been known for a while, but researchers are still identifying why it occurs. Though many factors likely contribute, one of growing interest is misinformation’s frequent ability to provide people with a new sense of certainty or understanding.

People like to know the causes of events in the world. When misinformation provides a sense of causal understanding, people will incorporate it into their understanding of what causes or caused related events to occur. For instance, for those who believed there was tremendous support for former President Trump and therefore expected him to be reelected, his loss might have created uncertainty about how that could have happened. Misinformation stating that the election was stolen offers a causal explanation that could reduce that uncertainty.

Does Desire for Causal Understanding Outweigh the Truth?

Recent research we conducted (Susmann & Wegener) suggests that people’s desire for causal understanding can lead them to resist corrections of misinformation. When misinformation that provides causal understanding is corrected, people perceive it as a threat to their understanding of the event. Because people want to understand, this is an unpleasant experience. As such, people feel motivated to maintain causal understanding. The simplest way to do this is to disregard the correction and continue believing the misinformation.

We found support for these ideas across several studies. In one, participants were told about a fire that supposedly occurred at a warehouse. Because we wanted to isolate the role of causal understanding, we used a description of a particular fire because it should be free from confounding factors like pre-existing knowledge or attitudes.

Participants were initially told that the fire resulted from combustible materials being carelessly stored in a side room (the misinformation). Later, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In one, they received a correction of the misinformation stating that no combustible materials were stored in the side room. In the other condition, they received a correction of a separate piece of information irrelevant to the cause of the fire regarding who had initially sounded the alarm. Therefore, participants’ understanding of the cause of the fire was threatened by the first correction but not the second.

Correction of the misinformation caused participants to report significantly greater discomfort than correction of the irrelevant information. In addition, participants’ reported discomfort in the misinformation correction condition predicted their continued belief in the misinformation—those who experienced higher levels of discomfort were more likely to disregard the correction and to continue believing the misinformation than those who experienced lower levels of discomfort.

Therefore, it appears that participants were motivated to maintain their causal understanding. When that understanding was threatened by a correction, they felt uncomfortable and rejected the correction in order to reduce their discomfort and retain their causal understanding. It is notable that this occurred in a context about which participants likely cared little. The fact that threats to participants’ understanding of what caused this fire produced discomfort might suggest that peoples’ need to understand events is quite influential, and the more important the event, the more discomfort from threats to causal understanding might drive acceptance of misinformation.

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How Can Corrections Be Made More Effective?

We examined whether this discomfort-driven process can be interrupted to make corrections more effective. Namely, if people could be convinced that experiencing discomfort in response to a correction is actually a good thing, that might prevent them from seeking to reduce that discomfort.

In a separate study, all participants received the version of the message that contained the misinformation correction. The instructions received before reading the message were manipulated. In one condition, participants were told that experiencing discomfort when one encounters conflicting information is a good thing; it means that one is not jumping to conclusions based on incomplete information and is doing exactly what one should to form the most accurate conclusion. In the second condition (the control condition), participants did not receive these instructions.

Those told to view discomfort positively were less uncomfortable with the correction of the misinformation and also believed the misinformation significantly less than those in the control condition. These results suggest that people’s interpretation of discomfort can be altered, and doing so can change how people react to corrections. If discomfort from corrections is seen as something to embrace rather than avoid, the motivation to disregard a correction to reduce discomfort is eliminated. As such, this approach might offer a relatively simple means to make corrections more effective.

Conclusions

Although the continued influence of misinformation feels like an intractable problem, those combatting misinformation are not powerless to stop it. Means can be developed to increase the efficacy of corrections. To reliably increase correction effectiveness, it is likely necessary to first identify why people are resistant to corrections. Those reasons might differ across different pieces of misinformation or populations.

If discomfort reduces correction acceptance, there likely exist many factors that contribute to this discomfort but also many ways to prevent this discomfort from causing people to disregard corrections. By researching these questions more closely, we can help to bring about solutions to this growing challenge.