Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing: Continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychol. Sci. Public Interest, 13, 106–131.
Summary
This foundational review synthesizes cognitive and social psychology to explain why misinformation persists even after clear, credible corrections—a phenomenon called the “continued influence effect.” The authors argue against the naive assumption that retraction alone erases false belief: people continue to rely on discredited information in reasoning and decision-making, and corrections can even backfire, entrenching the original misbelief. The paper integrates laboratory findings on truth assessment, fluency, and memory updating with real-world cases (vaccine-autism, Iraq WMD, “birther” and “death panel” myths) and distills theory-grounded, actionable recommendations for practitioners tasked with debunking.
Key Contributions
- A comprehensive cross-disciplinary synthesis of why misinformation persists at both individual and societal levels.
- Consolidation of competing theoretical accounts of the continued influence effect (mental models, retrieval failure, fluency/familiarity, reactance).
- Explicit cataloguing of counterproductive “backfire” effects—familiarity, overkill, and worldview—that practitioners must avoid.
- Concrete, cognitively grounded recommendations for journalists, health professionals, educators, and science communicators.
- A bridge between controlled cognitive experiments and real-world public-information and policy contexts.
Methods
A narrative literature review spanning cognitive psychology, social psychology, political science, and communication research. It centers on the experimental continued influence paradigm (notably the fictitious warehouse-fire narrative, where target misinformation is later retracted), supplements it with real-world case studies (vaccine-autism myth, Iraq WMD claims, corrective Listerine advertising), and integrates findings on fluency/familiarity, source credibility, and social consensus.
Findings
- Retractions at most halve reliance on misinformation, and sometimes have no effect—even when people remember and believe the correction.
- Strengthened negations can backfire (e.g., “paint and gas were never on the premises” increased reliance on that information).
- “Myth vs. fact” campaigns can reverse after a short delay (~30 min), with readers later misremembering myths as facts—especially older adults.
- Only three techniques reliably improve corrections: pre-exposure warnings, repeated retractions, and providing an alternative causal explanation that fills the coherence gap.
- Providing a plausible alternative narrative is the most effective technique.
- Worldview-dissonant corrections can produce backfire effects, though evidence is mixed.
- Media outlet choice predicts misinformation levels, and “false balance” distorts issues like climate consensus.
- Fluency, repetition, and perceived social consensus increase acceptance of statements as true, even from a single repeated source.
Connections
This review is the theoretical backbone for much subsequent work on inoculation and message design against misinformation, connecting directly to prebunking and psychological-inoculation approaches such as van-der-Linden2026-jt and Spampatti2026-kx, as well as efforts to counter climate misinformation like Kotz2026-lk. Its account of correction efficacy and backfire also informs debunking-intervention studies including Costello2024-bg and the accuracy-prompt tradition exemplified by Pennycook2021-jq, while its societal “echo chamber” framing anticipates empirical work on selective exposure and diffusion such as Del-Vicario2016-uj and Vosoughi2018-at.