Misinformation can lead to socially detrimental behavior, which makes finding ways to combat its effects a matter of crucial public concern. A new paper by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General explores an innovative approach to countering the impact of factually incorrect information called “bypassing,” and finds that it may have advantages over the standard approach of correcting inaccurate statements.
“The gold standard for tackling misinformation is a correction that factually contradicts the misinformation” by directly refuting the claim, write former APPC postdoctoral fellow Javier A. Granados Samayoa, a research associate in the Social Action Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dolores Albarracín, Amy Gutmann Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor and director of APPC’s Communication Science division, in the study “Bypassing versus correcting misinformation: Efficacy and fundamental processes.” Corrections can work, but countering misinformation this way is an uphill battle: people don’t like to be contradicted, and a belief, once accepted, can be difficult to dislodge.
Bypassing works differently. Rather than directly addressing the misinformation, this strategy involves offering accurate information that has an implication opposite to that of the misinformation. For example, faced with the factually incorrect statement “genetically modified foods have health risks,” a bypassing approach might highlight the fact that genetically modified foods help the bee population. This counters the negative implication of the misinformation with positive implications, without taking the difficult path of confrontation.
Research into the bypassing strategy is relatively new. For the new Journal of Experimental Psychology study, Granados Samayoa and Albarracín tested whether bypassing can actually be superior to correction at changing attitudes and intentions, and under what circumstances. In six pre-registered experiments, the researchers compared the efficacy of corrections and bypassing messages at reducing the effect of factually incorrect news headlines under a variety of different conditions.
What the authors found, says Granados Samayoa, is that “bypassing can generally be superior to correction, specifically in situations when people are focused on forming beliefs, but not attitudes, about the information they encounter.” This is because “when an attitude is formed, it serves as an anchor for a person’s judgment of future claims. When a belief is formed, there is more room for influence, and a bypassing message generally exerts more.”
Read more at Annenberg Public Policy Center.
