Continued Influence Effect

What is the Continued Influence Effect?

The continued influence effect occurs when corrected misinformation still affects later reasoning. The old explanation can remain influential even after someone accepts a correction. That does not require deliberate refusal to update.

Evidence and Explanation

Ecker and colleagues’ 2022 review examines memory, reasoning, social, and emotional factors in this persistence.

Corrections can reduce misinformation’s influence without removing it entirely. This is different from a backfire effect, where a correction increases the influence above the relevant comparison level.

Why a Corrected Explanation Can Persist

• One account in the review concerns the mental model people build of an event. Removing its cause can leave a gap: something happened, but why? The old explanation may still supply an answer unless the correction becomes part of that model.
• Another account concerns retrieval: someone may remember the old information without retrieving its correction at the moment it is needed.

Imagine an incident report wrongly blaming an office flood on a tap left running. A correction rules that out. Later, someone still recommends reminders to turn off taps, even while agreeing that the report was wrong. The discarded cause is influencing the proposed solution. If the investigation instead identifies a burst pipe, explaining that cause provides a basis for considering pipe inspection. This hypothetical example shows why replacing an explanation can be more useful than merely denying it; it does not require conscious refusal to accept the correction.

Correction and Prevention

Prike and colleagues’ 2023 experiments did not find routine backfire from standalone corrections, although one skeptical condition produced mixed, measure-dependent evidence.

Prebunking prepares people to recognize misleading claims before encountering them; correction addresses misinformation afterward. Both can help. A clear replacement explanation may fill the gap left when a false explanation is removed. Their effectiveness depends on the message, audience, and outcome; persistence is not evidence that correction is useless.

For how misleading information can change a remembered event, see the misinformation effect.