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Abstract

It is broadly established that source cues matter for establishing information credibility (Pornpitakpan, 2004). Therefore, it is hardly surprising that when thinking about methods to address and correct misinformation, many scholars have pointed to the importance of source cues (Cook et al., 2017; Lewandowsky & van der Linden, 2021; Literat et al., 2021; Shen et al., 2019). But this research is plagued by inconsistent findings about which kinds of sources tend to be the most effective correctors (e.g., Berinsky, 2023; van der Meer & Jin, 2020; Vraga & Bode, 2017). We argue that research has not adequately accounted for recall of correction sources to better understand their effectiveness (but see Amazeen & Krishna, 2022; Swire-Thompson et al., 2023). For those reasons, in this project we use five separate experimental comparisons across three data collections to explore whether people can remember who offered a misinformation correction that they were exposed to, and whether source recall meaningfully affects the ability of a correction to increase accuracy. In general, we find relatively few people (38% to 54%) recall the source of a correction, speaking to the difficulties in making sources memorable. But we also demonstrate the importance of such recall: remembering the correction source in addition to the message itself boosts the impact of the correction on accuracy substantially. We reflect on the research needed to better understand how to boost source memorability and its implications for correction research.

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