You Don't Have to Tell a Story! A Registered Report Testing the Effectiveness of Narrative versus Non-Narrative Misinformation Corrections

"...the narrative versus non-narrative format does not matter for misinformation debunking, as long as corrections are easy to comprehend and contain useful, relevant, and credible information..."

Misinformation is insidious in that it often continues to influence people's reasoning after a clear correction has been provided (the "continued influence effect", or CIE). Misinformation featured in the media includes, for example, commonly encountered "myths" about causal relations (e.g., alleged links between childhood vaccinations and various negative health outcomes). One piece of advice often given by educators and science communicators regarding the communication of complex information, such as misinformation corrections, is to use stories. To assess this strategy, this study interrogates the persuasive superiority of the story format over non-narrative text when it comes to misinformation corrections.

Theoretically, the researchers proposed that narrative corrections might be more effective due to: (i) enhanced processing of the correction, as stories tend to result in stronger emotional involvement and transportation ; (ii) suppression of counterargument generation, caused by immersion in the narrative; or (iii) enhanced retrieval, resulting either from a more vivid memory representation or the availability of potent retrieval cues relating to the narrative structure (e.g., markers of spatiotemporal context or characters' emotional states or introspections).

The three experiments, which involved 2,279 participants, entailed narrative and non-narrative corrections that differed in format while conveying the same relevant information:

• Experiment 1 used fictional event reports (e.g., of wildfires) of the type used in most research on the CIE. The reports first introduced a piece of critical information that related to the cause of the event, while the correction refuted that piece of critical information. Participants' inferential reasoning regarding the event - in particular, their reliance on the critical information - was then measured via questionnaire.
• Experiment 2 corrected some common real-world "myths" while affirming some obscure facts (e.g., where a spike in seizures is claimed to have been linked to the introduction of a new compound vaccine). The researchers measured change in participants' beliefs, as well as their posttreatment inferential reasoning relating to the false claims.
• Experiment 3 examined the effect of correction format in the context of more controversial, real-world claims (e.g., "Children of homosexual parents have more mental health issues.") In this case, the non-narrative corrections explained the evidence suggesting that the claim is false (e.g., evidence that the strengths that are typically associated with mother-father families appear to the same degree in families with two same-sex parents); the narrative corrections contained the same facts but were presented as a quote from someone to whom the claim is directly relevant.

In all experiments, the researchers manipulated test delay (immediate vs. 2 days), as any potential benefit of the narrative format may only arise in the short term (if the story format aids primarily with initial comprehension and updating of the relevant mental model) or after a delay (if the story format aids primarily with later correction retrieval).

In all three experiments, it was found that narrative corrections are no more effective than non-narrative corrections. In reflecting on the results in the context of previous research on the topic, the researchers suggest various possibilities, such as that the format of a corrective message may matter when the topic is emotionally engaging, but not in more generally informative scenarios such as those examined here.

Therefore, considering this study's finding that, while stories and anecdotes can be powerful, there is no fundamental benefit of using a narrative format when debunking misinformation, frontline communicators are advised to focus primarily on correction content (vs. format).

Future work examining the effect of message format on debunking efforts could explore stories that are co-created with the audience, which may be useful in addressing misinformation, particularly in contexts characterised by limited access to or engagement with high-quality, fact-oriented information sources. Moreover, approaches that jointly present evidence and narrative elements, such as narrative data visualisation, might provide a promising approach for future interventions. Nonetheless, this study suggests that a narrative approach to debunking will not generally be superior.