The Influence of Misinformation

The brain holds on to false facts, even after they have been retracted.

After people realize the facts have been manipulated, they may do their best to set the record straight, i.e. judges tell juries to forget misleading testimony, newspapers publish retractions, etc. However, even explicit warnings to ignore misinformation cannot erase the damage done, according to a new study from the University of Western Australia.

College students were asked to read an account of an accident involving a busload of elderly passengers. The students were then told that there had been a mistake and that actually, those on the bus were not elderly.

Some others were told the bus had in fact been transporting a college hockey team. Others were warned about what psychologists call the continued influence of misinformation - that folk have a hard time ignoring what they first heard, even if they know it is wrong and should be extra vigilant about getting the story straight.

Students who had been warned about misinformation or given the alternative story were less likely than control subjects to make inferences using the old information later, but they still made mistakes, agreeing that “the passengers found it difficult to exit the bus because they were frail.”

This result shows that “even if you understand, remember and believe the retractions, this misinformation will still affect your inferences,” says Western Australia psychologist Ullrich Ecker, an author. Our memory is constantly connecting new facts to old and tying different aspects of a situation together, so that we may still unconsciously draw on facts we know to be wrong to make decisions later. “Memory has evolved to be both stable and flexible,” Ecker says, “but that also has a downside.”

How the brain stores information is at the base of the problem. It is axiomatic that “brain cells that fire together, wire together.” This can lead to forming (nearly) permanent connections. These connections form a network which refires later, which we experience as memory.

When new “related” experiences or inputs arrive, they can lead the network to develop further connections, adding to a memory and helping us learn, but sometimes modifying a memory and creating “false memories”. There is no “time/date stamp” on the information; it is associative/related memory that rules, not when something happened.

Work at Iowa State by Jason Chan pointed out that when an eyewitness is asked to make a police statement about a crime, memory can be clouded by misinformation—possibly introduced unknowingly by law enforcement, or through erroneous online accounts or news reports, or knowingly by clever attorneys. By the time the witness is asked to provide testimony in court, in what researchers call “retrieval-enhanced suggestibility,” or RES, there are mistakes.

As Chan points out “…people can confuse their memories, even if it’s information not specifically pertaining to that witnessed case. For example, if you saw a bank robbery and later saw a movie depicting bank robberies, whatever you remember from that movie—which has nothing to do with the real-life case—can interfere with your ability to recall the real-life case.”

Chan has published several articles on RES, the most recent in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition” in January 2011.

i personally experienced this "false memory" in a memory study conducted in an fMRI @ Penn State. After viewing many backpacks, motorcycles, lamps, pieces of furniture, etc. one day and then returning the next day to remember them, my brain created "false memories". The same types of articles were shown, some from the day before, some not. Some of the new ones were confused as ones from the day before, i.e. false memory.