A related but perhaps more surprising source of misinformation is literary fiction. People extract knowledge even from sources that are explicitly identified as fictional. This process is often adaptive, because fiction frequently contains valid information about the world. For example, non-Americans’ knowledge of U.S. traditions, sports, climate, and geography partly stems from movies and novels, and many Americans know from movies that Britain and Australia have left-hand traffic. By definition, however, fiction writers are not obliged to stick to the facts, which creates an avenue for the spread of misinformation, even by stories that are explicitly identified as fictional. A study by Marsh, Meade, and Roediger (2003) showed that people relied on misinformation acquired from clearly fictitious stories to respond to later quiz questions, even when these pieces of misinformation contradicted common knowledge. In most cases, source attribution was intact, so people were aware that their answers to the quiz questions were based on information from the stories, but reading the stories also increased people’s illusory belief of prior knowledge. In other words, encountering misinformation in a fictional context led people to assume they had known it all along and to integrate this misinformation with their prior knowledge (Marsh & Fazio, 2006; Marsh et al., 2003).
The effects of fictional misinformation have been shown to be stable and difficult to eliminate. Marsh and Fazio (2006) reported that prior warnings were ineffective in reducing the acquisition of misinformation from fiction, and that acquisition was only reduced (not eliminated) under conditions of active on-line monitoring—when participants were instructed to actively monitor the contents of what they were reading and to press a key every time they encountered a piece of misinformation (see also Eslick, Fazio, & Marsh, 2011). Few people would be so alert and mindful when reading fiction for enjoyment. These links between fiction and incorrect knowledge are particularly concerning when popular fiction pretends to accurately portray science but fails to do so, as was the case with Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear. The novel misrepresented the science of global climate change but was nevertheless introduced as “scientific” evidence into a U.S. Senate committee (Allen, 2005; Leggett, 2005)
Nice post!
Related excerpt from Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing on people’s tendency to pick up beliefs from fiction (note that this is a pre-replication crisis social psychology paper, so take it with a grain of salt):