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The Achilles' heel of the truth bias? High personal stakes reduce vulnerability to false information

Pantazi, Myrto; Klein, Olivier; Kissine, Mikhail; (2024) The Achilles' heel of the truth bias? High personal stakes reduce vulnerability to false information. European Journal of Social Psychology , 54 (6) pp. 1416-1429. 10.1002/ejsp.3086. Green open access

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Abstract

While, by default, people tend to believe communicated content, it is also possible that they become more vigilant when personal stakes increase. A lab (N = 72) and an online (N = 284) experiment show that people make judgements affected by explicitly tagged false information and that they misremember such information as true – a phenomenon dubbed the ‘truth bias’. However, both experiments show that this bias is significantly reduced when personal stakes – instantiated here as a financial incentive – become high. Experiment 2 also shows that personal stakes mitigate the truth bias when they are high at the moment of false information processing, but they cannot reduce belief in false information a posteriori, that is once participants have already processed false information. Experiment 2 also suggests that high stakes reduce belief in false information whether participants’ focus is directed towards making accurate judgements or correctly remembering information truthfulness. We discuss the implications of our findings for models of information validation and interventions against real-world misinformation.

Type: Article
Title: The Achilles' heel of the truth bias? High personal stakes reduce vulnerability to false information
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.3086
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.3086
Language: English
Additional information: © 2024 The Author(s). European Journal of Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Keywords: Belief formation, information validation, language, misinformation, truth bias
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10214639
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