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Correcting vaccine misinformation: A failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects

Individuals often continue to rely on misinformation in their reasoning and decision making even after it has been corrected. This is known as the continued influence effect, and one of its presumed drivers is misinformation familiarity. As continued influence can promote misguided or unsafe behavio...

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Autores principales: Ecker, Ullrich K. H., Sharkey, Caitlin X. M., Swire-Thompson, Briony
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10096191/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37043493
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281140
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author Ecker, Ullrich K. H.
Sharkey, Caitlin X. M.
Swire-Thompson, Briony
author_facet Ecker, Ullrich K. H.
Sharkey, Caitlin X. M.
Swire-Thompson, Briony
author_sort Ecker, Ullrich K. H.
collection PubMed
description Individuals often continue to rely on misinformation in their reasoning and decision making even after it has been corrected. This is known as the continued influence effect, and one of its presumed drivers is misinformation familiarity. As continued influence can promote misguided or unsafe behaviours, it is important to find ways to minimize the effect by designing more effective corrections. It has been argued that correction effectiveness is reduced if the correction repeats the to-be-debunked misinformation, thereby boosting its familiarity. Some have even suggested that this familiarity boost may cause a correction to inadvertently increase subsequent misinformation reliance; a phenomenon termed the familiarity backfire effect. A study by Pluviano et al. (2017) found evidence for this phenomenon using vaccine-related stimuli. The authors found that repeating vaccine “myths” and contrasting them with corresponding facts backfired relative to a control condition, ironically increasing false vaccine beliefs. The present study sought to replicate and extend this study. We included four conditions from the original Pluviano et al. study: the myths vs. facts, a visual infographic, a fear appeal, and a control condition. The present study also added a “myths-only” condition, which simply repeated false claims and labelled them as false; theoretically, this condition should be most likely to produce familiarity backfire. Participants received vaccine-myth corrections and were tested immediately post-correction, and again after a seven-day delay. We found that the myths vs. facts condition reduced vaccine misconceptions. None of the conditions increased vaccine misconceptions relative to control at either timepoint, or relative to a pre-intervention baseline; thus, no backfire effects were observed. This failure to replicate adds to the mounting evidence against familiarity backfire effects and has implications for vaccination communications and the design of debunking interventions.
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spelling pubmed-100961912023-04-13 Correcting vaccine misinformation: A failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects Ecker, Ullrich K. H. Sharkey, Caitlin X. M. Swire-Thompson, Briony PLoS One Research Article Individuals often continue to rely on misinformation in their reasoning and decision making even after it has been corrected. This is known as the continued influence effect, and one of its presumed drivers is misinformation familiarity. As continued influence can promote misguided or unsafe behaviours, it is important to find ways to minimize the effect by designing more effective corrections. It has been argued that correction effectiveness is reduced if the correction repeats the to-be-debunked misinformation, thereby boosting its familiarity. Some have even suggested that this familiarity boost may cause a correction to inadvertently increase subsequent misinformation reliance; a phenomenon termed the familiarity backfire effect. A study by Pluviano et al. (2017) found evidence for this phenomenon using vaccine-related stimuli. The authors found that repeating vaccine “myths” and contrasting them with corresponding facts backfired relative to a control condition, ironically increasing false vaccine beliefs. The present study sought to replicate and extend this study. We included four conditions from the original Pluviano et al. study: the myths vs. facts, a visual infographic, a fear appeal, and a control condition. The present study also added a “myths-only” condition, which simply repeated false claims and labelled them as false; theoretically, this condition should be most likely to produce familiarity backfire. Participants received vaccine-myth corrections and were tested immediately post-correction, and again after a seven-day delay. We found that the myths vs. facts condition reduced vaccine misconceptions. None of the conditions increased vaccine misconceptions relative to control at either timepoint, or relative to a pre-intervention baseline; thus, no backfire effects were observed. This failure to replicate adds to the mounting evidence against familiarity backfire effects and has implications for vaccination communications and the design of debunking interventions. Public Library of Science 2023-04-12 /pmc/articles/PMC10096191/ /pubmed/37043493 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281140 Text en © 2023 Ecker et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Ecker, Ullrich K. H.
Sharkey, Caitlin X. M.
Swire-Thompson, Briony
Correcting vaccine misinformation: A failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects
title Correcting vaccine misinformation: A failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects
title_full Correcting vaccine misinformation: A failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects
title_fullStr Correcting vaccine misinformation: A failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects
title_full_unstemmed Correcting vaccine misinformation: A failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects
title_short Correcting vaccine misinformation: A failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects
title_sort correcting vaccine misinformation: a failure to replicate familiarity or fear-driven backfire effects
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10096191/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37043493
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281140
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