Belief Updating in the Face of Misinformation

Greta Arancia Sanna and Professor David Lagnado have published new research exploring how people revise their beliefs when confronted with misinformation and subsequent corrections. Across four experiments, they show that individuals are sensitive to the reliability of the sources delivering both the misinformation and its retraction. Unlike previous studies that often find people “cling” to false beliefs, their findings suggest that people update their beliefs in a rational and source-sensitive way. These findings, published in the Journal “Cognition”, highlight the importance of credible sources in efforts to correct misinformation—particularly in political and public health contexts.