Department of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Mem Cognit. 2021 Jan;49(1):32-45. doi: 10.3758/s13421-020-01075-9.
Advertising is seen as an untrustworthy source because of the perceived self-interest of the advertisers in presenting product information in a biased or misleading way. Regulations require advertising messages in print and online media to be labeled as advertisements to allow recipients to take source information into account when judging the credibility of the messages. To date, little is known about how these source tags are remembered. Research within the source-monitoring framework suggests that source attributions are not only based on veridical source memory but are often reconstructed through schematic guessing. In two experiments, we examined how the credibility of advertising messages affects these source attribution processes. The source of the messages affected judgments of credibility at the time of encoding, but the source tags were forgotten after a short period of time. Retrospective source attributions in the absence of memory for the source tags were strongly influenced by the a priori credibility of the messages: Statements with a low a priori credibility were more likely to be (mis)attributed to advertising than statements with high a priori credibility. These findings suggest that the mere labeling of untrustworthy sources is of limited use because source information is quickly forgotten and memory-based source attributions are strongly biased by schematic influences.
由于广告商在以有偏见或误导的方式呈现产品信息时存在明显的自身利益，因此广告被视为不可信的信息来源。法规要求印刷和网络媒体中的广告信息要标注为广告，以便接收者在判断信息的可信度时考虑到来源信息。迄今为止，人们对这些来源标签的记忆方式知之甚少。在来源监测框架内的研究表明，来源归因不仅基于真实的来源记忆，而且通常通过图式猜测进行重建。在两项实验中，我们研究了广告信息的可信度如何影响这些来源归因过程。信息的来源会在编码时影响对可信度的判断，但在短时间后，来源标签就会被遗忘。在没有来源标签记忆的情况下进行回溯性归因时，信息的先验可信度会产生强烈影响：与高先验可信度的信息相比，低先验可信度的信息更有可能被（错误）归因于广告。这些发现表明，仅仅对不可信的来源进行标注作用有限，因为来源信息很快就会被遗忘，基于记忆的来源归因会受到图式影响的强烈偏见。
