The continued influence of implied and explicitly stated misinformation with different emotional valence

ABSTRACT

Misinformation often affects people’s cognition and judgment even when they are aware of a retraction; this is known as the continued influence effect of misinformation (CIE). The aim of the present study was to verify if the expressive style affects the CIE with different emotional valence. We designed a 2 (emotional valence: positive or negative) * 2(expressive style: explicit or implied) * 2 (correction condition: uncorrected or corrected) within-subject experiment. Participants were asked to finish memory questions and inference questions. The results found an interaction between expressive style and emotional valence. For positive misinformation, the expressive style had no effect; for negative misinformation, the CIE was stronger in the explicitly stated condition compared with the implied condition. The explicitly stated misinformation was more difficult to correct than the implied misinformation. The results provided evidence to explain the role of emotional valence and expressive style on CIE.

KEYWORDS:

• Continued influence
• misinformation
• emotional valence
• expressive style

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study were openly available on Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/C5URZ5

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. The reported experiments were not preregistered.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Youth Innovation Team of Shandong Provincial Higher Education Institutions: [Grant Number 2022RW019]; Social Science Planning Project of Shandong Province: [Grant Number 22DJYJ01], [Grant Number 23DYYJ02]; Planning Project for the 14th Five Year Plan of Shandong Province education Sciences: [Grant Number 2021QZC001].