The Influence of Age on the Effectiveness of Misinformation Retractions

Misinformation has become a prescient issue in public and academic domains. One pernicious aspect of misinformation is that it can persistently influence people’s judgements after clear and credible correction—a phenomenon dubbed the continued influence effect. There has been speculation that age may affect people’s susceptibility to the continued influence effect, but previous research has produced inconclusive evidence. In an attempt to reconcile conflicting findings, the current study used a continued influence paradigm in which causal event misinformation was retracted. Two samples were analysed with correlation analyses and linear mixed-effects modelling: an online sample aged 21-79 (the 21+ sample; N = 259) and an in-person sample aged 56-92 (the 56+ sample; N = 143). Results showed that, when controlling for poor encoding of experimental materials in the online 21+ sample, age had no significant effect on the effectiveness of misinformation retractions, though declining effectiveness was observed with advanced older age in the 56+ sample.