You Could Look it up: Exposures to Inaccurate Information and Online Search

Donovan, Amalia Margery

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-1xb7-vw52

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You Could Look it up: Exposures to Inaccurate Information and Online Search

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Reading informs our understandings of the world. Information we encounter in both academic and everyday reading situations can be integrated into our general knowledge, influencing our perceptions and decisions. When the information we read is valid, these influences are desirable. However, we are also routinely exposed to inaccurate information which, if influential, would be problematic. Unfortunately, readers have been shown to rely on both accurate and inaccurate information contained in what they read to complete subsequent tasks. For the purposes of this dissertation, reliance on inaccurate information is defined as instances in which readers’ responses on post-reading tasks reflect pieces of false information with which they were previously presented. Reliance often takes the form of readers directly supplying false information from texts to answer later questions or agreeing with false statements at elevated rates. This phenomenon has proven difficult to attenuate, with few studies demonstrating reliable reductions in the influences of inaccurate information. The overarching purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how opportunities for online search (i.e., using online resources in the service of identifying and checking valid responses when completing assigned tasks) might influence rates of reliance on inaccurate information. While online search is ubiquitous in daily life, it has rarely figured in empirical research on the influence of exposures to inaccurate information. As such, examining how engagement in online search might impact rates of reliance on inaccurate information provides a critical test of the external generalizability of this phenomenon. Allowing for search should result in more externally valid estimates of the rates at which readers might actually use false information in everyday reading scenarios. The first chapter of this dissertation offers a literature review of projects providing evidence of people’s reliance on inaccurate information, obtained across a range of methodologies that exemplify the scope of the problem. Subsequently, the first chapter moves its focus to studies that utilize the same general procedures and materials that have offered well-replicated demonstrations of the issue, and that will be applied in the four experiments comprising this dissertation. Next, the chapter provides a review of previously tested interventions designed to mitigate reliance on inaccurate information. Finally, the chapter argues for the utility of online search as a means of attenuating the deleterious effects of exposure to inaccurate information, grounded in the review of applicable literature. The next four chapters each present an introduction, methods, results, and discussion of findings from four experiments examining different facets of inaccurate information use and online search. Experiment 1 provides evidence for the efficacy of online search opportunities as a means of reliably reducing people’s use of inaccurate information on post-reading tasks within a general adult population. Experiment 2 provides a replication of these findings with a different sample and experimental context, in addition to supplementing findings with qualitative analyses of participants’ search behaviors. These analyses offer insight into the reliability of participants’ search reports, how participants went about searching, and the specific ways in which search impacts task performance. Experiment 3 tests a means by which the frequency of participants’ search behaviors might be increased to in turn reduce reliance on inaccurate information. Experiment 4 utilized a think-aloud and semi-structured interview protocol to provide an additional, richer qualitative assessment of participants’ thought processes as they completed the experimental tasks and engaged in online search. The final chapter summarizes the key findings, implications, and limitations of these four experiments, as well as directions for future work.

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