The Influence of Age on the Effectiveness of Misinformation Retractions

ABSTRACT Misinformation has become a much‐discussed issue in public and academic domains. One harmful aspect of misinformation is that it can persistently influence people's judgements after clear and credible correction—a phenomenon known as the continued influence effect. There has been speculation that age affects people's susceptibility to the continued influence effect, but previous research has produced inconclusive evidence, specifically across testing modalities. To try and reconcile conflicting findings, the current study used a continued‐influence paradigm wherein causal event misinformation was retracted. Two samples were analysed using correlation and linear mixed‐effects modelling: an online sample aged 21–79 ( N = 259) and an in‐person sample aged 56–92 ( N = 143). Results showed that, when controlling for encoding of experimental materials in the online sample, age had no significant effect on the effectiveness of misinformation retractions, though declining effectiveness was observed with advanced older age in the in‐person sample.