Evaluating the Role of Saliency and Beliefs in the Recall of Corrections

Abstract

In today’s rapidly evolving online social network (OSN) landscape, health misinformation has emerged as a significant concern, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic. One effective educational strategy against health misinformation involves providing users with corrections that offer accurate, relevant facts. Although a large body of research has evaluated the effectiveness of corrections, there is still much uncertainty around the precise effects that correction messages have on reducing misinformation beliefs. Existing research acknowledges the importance of the underlying beliefs of users when it comes to the effectiveness of corrections. Several factors are found to affect the belief reinforcement and change processes such as the continued influence of misinformation, inattention, and use of intuition when evaluating facts. On the other hand, the aspects of corrections that are salient to a reader's memory are relatively understudied. In this dissertation, I investigate mechanisms grounded in the memory and decision-making literature, such as frequency and valence, that have been theorized to increase the salience of experience, and evaluate whether these mechanisms enhance the salience of corrections to misinformation in memory and how strongly they affect the recall of those corrections during misinformation judgments. Drawing inspiration from studies on human memory and learning, my initial experiments tested the hypothesis that exposing people to more frequent corrections would increase their availability and improve their ability to identify misinformation by making the corrections easier to recall during judgment. I conducted two laboratory experiments to test whether experiencing frequent corrections to misinformation improved participants' ability to discriminate between true and false news claims during extended extreme events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from both experiments indicate that increasing frequency of corrections may not improve the ability of participants to identify misinformation. The results also suggest that prior beliefs better determined the likelihood that individuals were likely to accept corrections. In subsequent experiments, I reoriented my study to another crucial aspect of memory salience: emotional salience. This line of inquiry sought to understand how individual preferences for content with varying degrees of emotional valence could improve the salience of corrections in memory. The goal was to design targeted corrections for health misinformation and study the effect of such corrections on recall of their content by human subjects. Finally, the results of the experiment were used to study the specific features of correction text that are likely to increase cognitive load on the user perusing the content. Through multiple experiments, this dissertation makes significant and original contributions in: experimental methodology and design, empirical findings in effectiveness of corrections, and insights into cognitive effects of textual features of corrections. Initial experiments demonstrated that merely increasing correction frequency was insufficient to increase the salience of corrections in memory. Results revealed that pre-existing individual beliefs were stronger predictors of correction effectiveness than intervention quantity. Subsequent experiments, focused on message quality and personalized design. The results showed that overall emotional targeting failed, but successful correction recall was significantly driven by individual working memory capacity. The findings from this research enables evaluation and application of correction strategies in realistic OSN environments. This research concludes by underscoring the need to move beyond statistical correlation to develop a mechanistic, individualized model based on a cognitive architecture to accurately design effective corrections.