The Achilles’ heel of the truth bias? High personal stakes reduce vulnerability to false information

Abstract

While, by default, people tend to believe communicated content, it is also possible that they become more vigilant when personal stakes increase. A lab (N = 72) and an online (N = 284) experiment show that people make judgements affected by explicitly tagged false information and that they misremember such information as true – a phenomenon dubbed the ‘truth bias’. However, both experiments show that this bias is significantly reduced when personal stakes – instantiated here as a financial incentive – become high. Experiment 2 also shows that personal stakes mitigate the truth bias when they are high at the moment of false information processing, but they cannot reduce belief in false information a posteriori, that is once participants have already processed false information. Experiment 2 also suggests that high stakes reduce belief in false information whether participants’ focus is directed towards making accurate judgements or correctly remembering information truthfulness. We discuss the implications of our findings for models of information validation and interventions against real-world misinformation.