CeDEx Seminar - Duarte Gonçalves (University College London)

Retractions: Learning from Information about Information

Toward understanding the persistence of widely discredited ideas, we study the effectiveness of retractions in correcting beliefs. Our experimental design identifies belief updating from retractions - the revoking of earlier information – and compares it to updating from equivalent new information. Retractions are ineffective: subjects update approximately one-third less from them versus both the retracted evidence and informationally equivalent new evidence. Although we document several well-known biases in belief updating, our results require an explanation that treats retractions as intrinsically different. We find evidence for one such mechanism, while ruling out several others: retractions, information about information, are inherently more complex than direct information.