Fore! Does forewarning inoculate people against the false balance effect?

Abstract

Background & Aims

We examined the effect of falsely balanced messages on perceptions of expert consensus about non-verbal lie detection and whether forewarning inoculates people against the fake debate strategy.

Materials & Methods

Participants (N = 307) read a media report that revealed high consensus among experts (nearly 90%) that non-verbal cues are unreliable indicators of deception and were randomly exposed to (1) no comments from experts, (2) balanced comments (three comments from each expert on opposing sides), (3) evidentiary balanced comments (five comments from a deception detection expert and one comment from a contrarian expert), (4) balanced comments along with a forewarning about the ‘fake debate’ strategy, or (5) evidentiary balanced comments along with a forewarning about the ‘fake debate’ strategy.

Results

Results showed that participants intuitively believe that non-verbal cues are reliable indicators of deceit. Although participants were made aware that the consensus from scientists is that non-verbal lie detection is futile, the inclusion of balanced comments alongside the data still decreased perceived scientific consensus. Balanced comments also reduced people’s policy support in favour of scientific consensus, and forewarning had minimal effect.

Discussion

We discuss the implications of our findings for efforts to mitigate the fake debate strategy.