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Category: Project

Description: The misinformation effect refers to the finding that participant witnesses who are exposed to misleading post-event information will frequently report this misleading information as if it had occurred during the original event when given a subsequent memory test. This finding has been replicated numerous times and has been demonstrated under a variety of experimental conditions. While research has identified a number of factors that may enhance or diminish this effect (e.g., the presence of a pre-test warning informing participants that they have been misled), little is known about how different levels of cognitive processing may influence participants’ susceptibility to misinformation. Previous research has shown that people can process information in one of two ways: a quick, intuitive, processing style or a more deliberate, analytical, processing style. The goal of the present study is to investigate the impact of induced analytical processing on the misinformation effect.