Department of Psychology, 2029 Sheridan Drive, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Cognition. 2022 Aug;225:105121. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105121. Epub 2022 Apr 13.
People are exposed to inaccurate claims and ideas every day from sources intended to inform, entertain, or do both. A large body of research has demonstrated that exposures to inaccurate statements, even when conveying obviously false ideas, can affect people's subsequent judgments. Contemporary accounts suggest that these effects may be due to people's failure to evaluate information during exposure, increasing the likelihood that false information will be encoded and available for retrieval on subsequent tasks. In three experiments, we investigated whether evaluative mindsets reduce the likelihood people are influenced by and use inaccurate statements, as well as encourage reliance on accurate understandings. In Experiment 1, participants who were instructed to engage in deliberate evaluation of potentially inaccurate statements reproduced fewer inaccurate ideas and produced more correct answers to post-reading questions than did participants who simply rated their interest in the statements. In Experiments 2 and 3, the same benefits were obtained even when participants were not consistently prompted to evaluate the statements. These results offer insight into when and how evaluation can encourage participants to rely on correct prior knowledge over presented inaccuracies, as well as what is required to establish and maintain such an evaluative mindset.
人们每天都会从各种来源接触到不准确的说法和观点，这些来源旨在提供信息、娱乐或两者兼而有之。大量研究表明，即使传达的是明显错误的想法，接触到不准确的陈述也会影响人们随后的判断。当代的说法表明，这些影响可能是由于人们在接触时未能评估信息，从而增加了错误信息被编码并在后续任务中可供检索的可能性。在三个实验中，我们研究了评价心态是否会降低人们受到不准确陈述影响并使用不准确陈述的可能性，以及鼓励人们依赖准确的理解。在实验 1 中，与仅仅对陈述的兴趣进行评分的参与者相比，被指示对潜在不准确的陈述进行深思熟虑的评估的参与者复制的不准确想法更少，对阅读后问题的回答也更正确。在实验 2 和 3 中，即使参与者没有一直被提示评估陈述，也获得了相同的好处。这些结果深入了解了评价何时以及如何鼓励参与者依靠正确的先验知识而不是呈现的不准确信息，以及建立和维持这种评价心态需要什么。
