Belief updating in the face of misinformation: The role of source reliability

Abstract

This paper investigates the process of belief updating in the presence of contradictory and potentially misleading information, focusing on the impact of source reliability. Across four experiments, we examined how individuals revise their beliefs when confronted with retracted information and varying source credibility. Experiment 1 revealed that participants discounted retracted information and reverted to their prior beliefs, in contrast to the Continued Influence Effect commonly reported in the literature. Experiment 2 demonstrated that source reliability significantly influences belief updating: reliable sources led participants to discount initial allegations more effectively than unreliable sources. Experiments 3 and 4 examined how people update their beliefs given opposing sources of differing reliability; we found that participants appropriately incorporated source reliability and penalised sources that were corrected, regardless of the corrector's reliability. Additionally, in contrast to previous research, both trustworthiness and expertise contributed to judgments of source reliability. Our results resolve some of the mixed findings in previous research, and highlight that individuals' belief updating are rationally sensitive to differences in source reliability. Our findings have broad implications for correcting misinformation in political, medical, and other applied contexts, and further underscore the need to ground misinformation correction strategies in robust psychological research.