On Sunday, Newsweek magazine retracted an earlier report that U.S. interrogators at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a copy of the Qur’an down a toilet. The initial report is credited with sparking deadly anti-American riots in Afghanistan and, as a result, the retraction has received widespread attention. But new research suggests that, even with a very public correction of the record, readers of the original report may continue to believe the now-discredited story.
The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society, suggests that once you’ve seen a news report, you may go on believing it, even if later information shows it to have been false.
Media coverage of the Iraq War has been characterized by frequent corrections, retractions, and false information, particularly in regards to weapons of mass destruction and treatment of coalition prisoners. New research conducted by Stephan Lewandowsky and Werner G.K. Stritzke, University of Western Australia; Klaus Oberauer, Universit�t Potsdam; and Michael Morales, Plattsburgh State University of New York, investigated the effects that those retractions and disconfirmations had on people’s memory of war-related events. The researchers concluded that repetition of news stories assisted in the creation of false memories and that corrected misinformation did not change people’s beliefs unless they were skeptical of the information to begin with.
Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.Like this author?
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 18 May 2005
Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.
Grohol, J. (2005). Misinformation: Seeing Is Believing. Psych Central. Retrieved on February 14, 2012, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2005/05/18/misinformation-seeing-is-believing/
