The differential consequences of correcting misinformation for high and low credibility sources.

Communicating accurately is essential for maintaining credibility as a source of information. However, it is unclear whether being inaccurate impacts perceptions of sources equivalently. Across two experiments, we investigated whether correcting inaccuracies differentially impacted credibility for high and low credibility sources (i.e., doctors and politicians, respectively). Participants read a vignette about a high or low credibility source and rated their credibility. Participants were randomly allocated to a correction or a no correction control condition (Experiment 1) or a correction condition with different misinformation frames (highlighting that the source was unintentionally inaccurate, intentionally inaccurate, or uncertain about the information’s veracity; Experiment 2). Finally, participants rated belief in the source’s misinformation and re-rated credibility. In both experiments, we found that doctors were perceived as more credible and believed more than politicians pre-correction. In Experiment 1, correcting inaccuracies reduced doctors’ credibility more than politicians’, but belief in misinformation reduced equivalently. In Experiment 2, sources who were uncertain were perceived as less credible pre-correction, and being intentionally inaccurate was associated with the greatest post-correction credibility reduction. However, unlike Experiment 1, corrections impacted the credibility of sources equivalently. These findings underscore the importance of communicating accurately for maintaining trust and demonstrate that the reputational consequences of inaccuracy are sensitive to framing context.