Please register for the CV & Online Identity Workshop below.

Curiosity, belief, and confidence impact our understanding of what is true, and influence our ability to resist and correct the deleterious effects of misinformation. In this talk, I will address how people across the lifespan come to hold strong incorrect beliefs, how strong beliefs and memories can be held with high confidence, how high confidence errors may be overcome, and how individual differences influence both confidence and belief, systematically impacting our susceptibility to the continued influence of misconceptions. I will begin with an exploration of how people come to these hold strong beliefs, that is, how they make confidence judgments about the truth of their beliefs and memories. I will present behavioral results that examine the relationship between confidence and misconceptions and how that initial confidence influences how older and younger adults engage with corrective feedback. Additionally, the research discussed will examine how personal beliefs, current events, initial confidence, consideration of corrections to misconceptions, affect the long-term stability of knowledge updating across the adult lifespan. We tested whether misconceptions related to current events would be less resistant to updating as compared to commonly held misconceptions not in the current popular conversation. Generally, the results suggest item level confidence had little impact on knowledge updating. However, belief in the correction and global approaches to learning influenced how both young and older adults updated misconceptions.