Estimating the impact of immediate versus delayed corrections on belief accuracy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Prior work has found that early corrections are often more effective than corrections encountered sometime after exposure to misinformation. However, these studies have generally considered only brief delays between misinformation exposure and correction, and do not explore processing style as a potential moderator of correction timing. We conducted a two-wave online experiment randomly assigning participants to receive corrections either shortly after exposure or approximately one week later. We find that both immediate and delayed corrections influenced belief accuracy and policy support, but immediate corrections were no more influential than delayed corrections, contrary to earlier findings. In addition, processing style had no moderating effect on the influence of correction timing.