ABSTRACT
At times, people are exposed to initial misinformation that is corrected later. For example, suppose a newspaper initially reports that a family died of food poisoning after eating at a Chinese restaurant. If it turned out that the restaurant was not responsible for the deaths, the newspaper would typically print a retraction or correction. Ideally perhaps, the misinformation should not influence people’s final understanding of that event because the newspaper should not have presented the misinformation in the first place. People who continued to rely on the misinformation could misunderstand the event’s true causes, make biased evaluations of the dangers of eating Chinese food, and take actions with unfair consequences for the restaurant’s innocent owners. However, a number of studies in text comprehension (Johnson & Seifert, 1994; Wilkes & Leatherbarrow, 1988) and studies of social judgments (Anderson, Lepper, & Ross, 1980; Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975; Wyer & Unverzagt, 1985) found that corrected misinformation can continue to influence people’s reasoning. This chapter reviews evidence on possible reasons why people have difficulty in comprehending corrections, and then presents some new data on updating situation models after a correction.
