Disinformation elicits learning biases
Juan Vidal-Perez, Raymond Dolan and Rani Moran
In general, people recognize that some information sources are more trustworthy than others. For example, a person may be more likely to trust information from peer-reviewed articles rather than news sites with the only aim to ‘get more clicks’. In a study performed by Vidal-Perez et al., it examined how people learn when information sources are more or less trustworthy.
Participants played a simple game and were told in advance of each source’s reliability. For example, one source was always accurate, whereas another was only correct half of the time. However, participants could not see the real outcome, and therefore couldn’t determine whether the feedback they received was accurate or not. In general, people relied heavily on trustworthy sources, but were still influenced by the source essentially providing random feedback. They also responded strongly to positive feedback rather than negative feedback, especially when the source was unreliable.
Overall, this study showed that simply knowing a source can be unreliable does not prevent people from being influenced by it. Participants still changed their decisions based on learning information from a source that was only correct half of the time, suggesting that disinformation can shape learning even when people are aware that it may be false. Understanding these biases in learning may help researchers develop more effective ways of reducing the influence of misinformation.
