ArticleInternational journal of environmental research and public health2022
Authority Brings Responsibility: Feedback from Experts Promotes an Overweighting of Health-Related Pseudoscientific Beliefs.
Article in International journal of environmental research and public health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Twelve Tips for Recognizing and Addressing the Adverse Effects of Medical Education Interventions: Tutorial.JMIR medical education · 2026Article
- Conditional effects of source expertise and pre-existing attitudes on objective knowledge in AI-assisted health information verification.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Anchored and Propagated Updating Within Pseudoscientific Belief Systems.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Selective Integration of Social Feedback Promotes a Stable and Positively Biased Self-Concept.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2025Article
- "The Dark Side of Musculoskeletal Care": Why Do Ineffective Techniques Seem to Work? A Comprehensive Review of Complementary and Alternative Therapies.Biomedicines · 2025Review
- Deciphering the Roots of Pharmacists' Critical Thinking About Pseudoscientific Claims: Insights from a Cross-Sectional Survey.Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The popularity and spread of health-related pseudoscientific practices is a worldwide problem. Despite being counteracted by competent agents of our societies, their prevalence and spread continue to grow. Current research has focused on identifying which characteristics make us more likely to hold pseudoscientific beliefs. However, how we hold these beliefs despite all the available information against them is a question that remains unanswered. Here, we aimed to assess if the development of health-related pseudoscientific beliefs could be driven by a positive bias in belief updating. Additionally, we aimed to explore whether this bias could be exacerbated, depending on source credibility. In this study, participants (N = 116) underwent a belief updating task where they offered their agreement with various health-related pseudoscientific statements before and after receiving supporting and discrediting feedback from (a) experts (doctors), (b) peers, or (c) a random number generator. Our results suggest that when receiving feedback from experts (but not from peers or random feedback), the participants preferentially integrated supporting information relative to discrediting information about health-related pseudoscience. We discuss the implications of this biased belief updating pattern on health-related pseudoscientific research and suggest new strategies for intervention focused on increasing awareness, training, and consensus among healthcare practitioners.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.