Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Information initially presented as a likely cause of an eventbut turns out to be incorrect can affect people’s reasoningdespite being clearly corrected – a phenomenon known as thecontinued influence effect of misinformation. The presentwork extends previous findings showing that misinformationthat implies a likely cause of an adverse outcome is moreresistant to correction than misinformation that explicitlystates a likely cause. Participants either read a reportdescribing a fire or a crash. The difference between impliedand explicitly stated misinformation was replicated with thefire scenario, which has been commonly used in continuedinfluence research. There was little evidence of a continuedinfluence of misinformation for the (novel) crash scenario.The results constrain the generalizability of the continuedinfluence effect and suggest that corrections that clearlyinvalidate initial misinformation can be effective.