Counteracting the Effects of Misinformation

Source: Image generated with AI March 14, 2025

It is hard to escape false information in the modern world. People throw out beliefs that fly in the face of established science or contradict verified events on social media, in the mainstream media, and in conversations. False beliefs based on this misinformation can affect people’s attitudes, which can influence people’s later behavior.

This impact of misinformation and false beliefs has led to considerable research aimed at understanding the effect that false beliefs have on people as well as ways to counteract those beliefs. Research going back 30 years suggests that false beliefs can continue to drive your judgments, even after you are told that the information you encountered is not true.

This work suggests that the natural mode of trying to counteract misinformation is limited. When you find out someone has a false belief, the most obvious thing to do is to provide them with information to help them recognize that what they currently believe is not true and to point to the truth. False beliefs are resistant to being told that they aren’t true, though it can help to give people a reason why they encountered the false information so that they have some reason for wanting to discount it.

A 2025 paper by Javier Granados Samayoa and Dolores Albarracin in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General explores a more counterintuitive approach they call bypassing. In bypassing, you provide someone exposed to misinformation another (true) piece of information that pushes their attitude in the desired direction. For example, suppose you find out that someone has heard that foods containing GMOs are bad for your health. Instead of providing evidence that there is no evidence GMOs are bad for you, you might instead find evidence for some other benefit of GMOs. You might point out that there are GMOs that are resistant to common plant diseases that attack crops.

The idea behind this approach is that people do not always form an attitude about an object immediately. They may hear various facts about GMOs, for example, but not decide whether they like them or not until later. When it is time for them to form an attitude, they retrieve the information they know and use that to generate their attitude. A correction of false information requires people to retrieve both the initial fact that they learned as well as additional information that the initial fact is not true. They also have to connect the initial fact and the subsequent correction. In contrast, bypassing just requires that people retrieve the new bypassing information when forming the attitude.

The studies in this paper required people to read several headlines. (In most studies, the materials were made up, but the authors used real headlines in one study.) The initial fact that people read was the “false” information and was designed to give people a negative impression of the object. In the correction condition, participants then read a headline that said the initial headline was not true. In the bypass condition, participants read a headline that provided a different and positive fact about the object. A few studies had a control condition in which the second headline was not related to the original object. Later, participants were asked for their attitude toward the target object.

In all of the studies in which there was a control condition, both the correction and bypass conditions led to a more positive evaluation of the target object than the control condition. In most studies, participants read headlines fairly quickly, and so they tended not to form attitudes about the objects right away, but only when asked questions about their attitudes later. In these studies, the bypass condition led to more positive attitudes about the target than the correction condition. Only in a condition in which participants were cued to create attitudes immediately after reading a headline was there no difference in the attitudes in the correction and bypass conditions.

These studies suggest that an effective way to combat misinformation is to provide people with other (true) information that points in the direction of the desired attitude toward a target object. This strategy is effective, because it provides many opportunities for people to retrieve different facts about a target that will lead to a desired attitude.

Ultimately, of course, you could also choose a strategy that combines both correction and bypassing. That is, you could provide people with information that what they read earlier was false as well as other information that points toward the desired attitude toward the target. Future research will have to explore whether this combined approach is effective.