According to Ullrich Ecker, a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia, “information that is initially accepted as valid but is later found to be incorrect can have a persistent influence on people’s memory and reasoning” and attempts to correct the incorrect interpretations “are often relatively ineffective even when people demonstrably remember the correction. As a result, people continue to rely on retracted misinformation in their inferential reasoning” (Ecker). Ecker conducted an experiment where he had different people read the same articles but with different headlines to see exactly how much headlines influence what people understand from the articles. One of the articles explained the change in the rate of burglaries. Although there was a 0.2 per cent rise in the past year, there was a 10 per cent decrease in the past ten years. For the experiment, some subjects were given the article with the title “Number of burglaries going up” while others were given “Downward trend in burglary rate.” The subjects were then given a “surprise quiz,” consisting of six questions that required the readers to recall details from the
According to Ullrich Ecker, a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia, “information that is initially accepted as valid but is later found to be incorrect can have a persistent influence on people’s memory and reasoning” and attempts to correct the incorrect interpretations “are often relatively ineffective even when people demonstrably remember the correction. As a result, people continue to rely on retracted misinformation in their inferential reasoning” (Ecker). Ecker conducted an experiment where he had different people read the same articles but with different headlines to see exactly how much headlines influence what people understand from the articles. One of the articles explained the change in the rate of burglaries. Although there was a 0.2 per cent rise in the past year, there was a 10 per cent decrease in the past ten years. For the experiment, some subjects were given the article with the title “Number of burglaries going up” while others were given “Downward trend in burglary rate.” The subjects were then given a “surprise quiz,” consisting of six questions that required the readers to recall details from the