Relative source credibility affects the continued influence effect: Evidence of rationality in the CIE

The Continued Influence Effect (CIE) is the phenomenon that retracted information often continues to influence judgments and inferences. The CIE is rational when the source that retracts the information (the retractor) is less credible than the source that originally presented the information (the informant; Connor Desai et al., 2020). Conversely, a CIE is not rational when the retractor is at least as credible as the informant. Thus, a rational account predicts that the CIE depends on the relative credibility of informant and retractor. In two experiments (N = 151, N = 146), informant credibility and retractor credibility were independently manipulated. Participants read a fictitious news report in which original information and a retraction were each presented by either a source with high credibility or a source with low credibility. In both experiments, when the informant was more credible than the retractor, participants showed a CIE compared to control participants who saw neither the information nor the retraction (ds > 0.82). When the informant was less credible than the retractor, participants showed no CIE, in line with a rational account. However, in Experiment 2, participants also showed a CIE when informant and retractor were equally credible (ds > 0.51). This cannot be explained by a rational account, but is consistent with error-based accounts of the CIE. Thus, a rational account alone cannot fully account for the complete pattern of results, but needs to be complemented with accounts that view the CIE as a memory-based error.