Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI, USA.
Memory. 2021 Jan;29(1):59-77. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2020.1854788. Epub 2020 Dec 8.
Many studies have documented that exposure to post event misinformation can lead eyewitnesses to misremember witnessing events they did not see and do so with high confidence. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether reporting of suggested misinformation can be reversed following a correction, and if so, whether misinformation would be more resistant to correction when it serves an explanatory function than when it does not. In two experiments participants witnessed an event, were exposed to a blatantly false suggestion(s) and one week later received a correction followed by a test of their memory for the witnessed event. We found evidence for both the persistence of misinformation following a correction (E1) and the complete reversibility of misinformation effects following a highly salient correction (E2). Although false reporting of the misinformation doubled when it served an explanatory function relative to when it did not (E1 and E2), in both experiments we found no evidence that resistance to correction varied as a function of the misinformation's explanatory role. Our findings suggest that, with a salient correction provided by a credible source, people are capable of updating their knowledge with new information that reverses what they previously thought.
许多研究都记录表明，接触事后错误信息会导致目击者错误地记住他们没有看到的事件，而且他们对此的记忆非常确信。本研究的目的是调查在纠正错误信息后，对建议的错误信息的报告是否可以被逆转，如果可以，那么当错误信息具有解释功能时，它是否比没有解释功能时更难被纠正。在两项实验中，参与者观看了一个事件，然后接触到一个明显错误的建议，一周后，他们收到了纠正信息，随后对他们所目睹的事件进行了测试。我们发现，在纠正后，错误信息存在持久性（实验 1），并且在高度明显的纠正后，错误信息的影响可以完全逆转（实验 2）。尽管当错误信息具有解释功能时，错误报告的次数会翻倍（实验 1 和实验 2），但在这两个实验中，我们没有发现任何证据表明纠正的难度会因错误信息的解释作用而有所不同。我们的研究结果表明，在一个可信来源提供的显著纠正之后，人们有能力用新的信息来更新他们的知识，这些新信息会推翻他们之前的想法。
