Reminders and Repetition of Misinformation: Helping or Hindering Its Retraction?

People frequently rely on information even after it has been retracted, a phenomenon known as the continued influence effect of misinformation. One factor proposed to explain the ineffectiveness of retractions is that repeating misinformation during a correction may inadvertently strengthen the misinformation by making it more familiar. Practitioners are therefore often encouraged to design corrections that avoid misinformation repetition. The current study tested this recommendation, investigating whether retractions become more or less effective when they include reminders or repetitions of the initial misinformation. Participants read fictional reports, some of which contained retractions of previous information, and inferential reasoning was measured via questionnaire. Retractions varied in the extent to which they served as misinformation reminders. Retractions that explicitly repeated the misinformation were more effective in reducing misinformation effects than retractions that avoided repetition, presumably because of enhanced salience. Recommendations for effective myth debunking may thus need to be revised. Information that is thought to be true but then turns out to be incorrect so-called misinformation can affect people's thinking and decision making even after it has been clearly corrected by a credible source, and even if people understand and later remember the correction. It has been proposed that one reason why corrections are so ineffective is that a myth is often repeated when it is corrected explaining that vaccines do not cause autism almost necessarily repeats the association between vaccines and autism. This repetition can make the myth more familiar such that it comes to mind more easily in the future. Based on this notion, one recommendation to "myth debunkers" has been to avoid myth repetition in a correction. The present study directly tested this recommendation. We presented participants with news reports that did or did not contain corrections; these corrections did or did not repeat the to-be-corrected misinformation explicitly. We found contrary to the popular recommendation that corrections were more effective when they explicitly repeated the myth. Thus, it seems "safe" and even beneficial to repeat the myth explicitly when debunking it.