Continued influence of false accusations in forming impressions of political candidates.

Abstract

Previous work has shown that false information affects decision-making even after being corrected, a phenomenon known as "continued influence effects" (CIEs). Using mock social media posts about fictional political candidates, we observe robust within-participant CIEs: candidates targeted by corrected accusations are rated more poorly than candidates not targeted by allegations. These effects occur both immediately and after as much as a 2-day delay. We further demonstrate that vulnerability to CIEs in a political context varies systematically between individuals. We found that certain groups are more susceptible to CIEs on immediate candidate ratings (i) those who rely more on intuitive feelings, (ii) those with lower digital literacy knowledge, and (iii) younger individuals. These individuals' judgments appear to be relatively more influenced by the refuted accusations and/or less influenced by the factual refutations. Interestingly, political orientation did not affect CIEs, despite its influence on explicitly identifying misinformation. Moreover, people recalled accusation stimuli better than refutations at a delay, suggesting that emotions may drive the prioritized processing of accusations. Our results indicate that analytic thinking could be protective when people judge political candidates targeted by refuted false information.