Influence Of Seductive Details, Belief-Congruence, And Repeated Testing On Memory For Controversial Information

People often encounter conflicting information on a wide array of topics. How they evaluate this information in relation to their current beliefs, and the effects of other influences, such as the weight given to superficial aspects of the information (e.g. pictures, anecdotes, or jargon that are at most minimally related to an author\u27s argument), has been of interest to researchers for many years. One component of their processing and evaluation of this information is their memory for the information. This study set out to examine the following questions: (1) Is belief-congruent in formation remembered better or worse than belief incongruent information? (2) Does the addition of superficial scientific information to belief-congruent or belief-incongruent information influence how well the newly presented information is remembered? (3) Does repeated testing have an effect on memory for the information? (4) Do any of these factors elicit a greater number of memory intrusions in a free recall task