In Case of Doubt for the Suspicion?: When People Falsely Remember Facts in the News as Being Uncertain

Modern media report news remarkably fast, often before the information is confirmed. This general tendency is even more pronounced in times of an increasing demand for information, such as in the case of pressing natural phenomena or the pandemic spreading of diseases. Yet, even if early reports correctly identify their content as suspicions (rather than facts), recipients may not adequately consider the preliminary nature of such information. Theories on language processing suggest that understanding a suspicion requires its reconstruction as a factual assertion first—which can later be erroneously remembered. This would lead to a bias to remember and treat suspicions as if they were factual, rather than falling for the reverse mistake. In five experiments, however, we demonstrate the opposite pattern. Participants read news headlines with explanations for distinct events either in form of a fact or a suspicion (as still being under investigation). Both kinds of framings increased the participants’ belief in the correctness of the respective explanations to an equal extent (relative to receiving no explanation). Importantly, however, this effect was not mainly driven by a neglect of uncertainty cues. In contrast, three memory experiments (recognition and cued recall) revealed a reverse distortion: a bias to falsely remember and treat a presented “fact” as if it were merely a suspicion. These surprising results stress the importance of developing new theoretical accounts on the processing of (un-)certainty cues which take into account their broader context, such as source credibility and the presence of uncertainty in other unrelated headlines.