Emotionality And Misinformation Essay

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Past research has shown that people continue to trust invalid information, even though the information has been corrected. The continued influence of misinformation has been explained by stating that people would rather accept false information that is complete than incomplete information, where the focal point has been deemed incorrect. Whilst, the effects of emotionality on misinformation have not been examined, past research predicts that emotionality creates a positive effect on memory, whereas, recent research suggests that it may make people more prone to memory distortions. As the research so far provides an erratic prediction for the effect of emotionality on misinformation, Ecker et al conducted 3 experiments to investigate how negative emotional stimuli, that we come across daily in the news, influences misinformation. They presented participants with fabricated news of a plane crash, with different causes in each of the experiments.

The first experiment implemented a 2x3 between subjects

They found a decrease in misinformation, after retraction alone, suggesting that memory was updated when the participants were emotional and that retraction on its own was adequate to minimise dependency on misinformation.

Experiment 3 was similar to experiment 2, but used a 3x3 between subjects design as it had 3 levels of emotionality. Low emotionality, where the cause was bad weather and no deaths, medium, which had the same cause, but led to over 100 deaths and high, where terrorists were to blame and over 100 people died. In low and medium conditions, the plane departed from Greece and in the high condition it departed from Iran. The plane crashed in France, in all conditions. The procedure was the same as experiment 2, except for a few changes. The experiment was conducted during a tutorial session and their unrelated task was working on a presentation for 20