With the rapid spread of information via social media, individuals are prone to misinformation exposure that they may utilize when forming beliefs. Over five experiments (total N = 815 adults, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States), we investigated whether people could ignore quantitative information when they judged for themselves that it was misreported. Participants recruited online viewed sets of values sampled from Gaussian distributions to estimate the underlying means. They attempted to ignore invalid information, which were outlier values inserted into the value sequences. Results indicated participants were able to detect outliers. Nevertheless, participants’ estimates were still biased in the direction of the outlier, even when they were most certain that they detected invalid information. The addition of visual warning cues and different task scenarios did not fully eliminate systematic over- and underestimation. These findings suggest that individuals may incorporate invalid information they meant to ignore when forming beliefs.

中文翻译：

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检测到无效信息可以忽略吗？

随着信息通过社交媒体迅速传播，个人很容易暴露错误信息，从而形成信念。我们通过五项实验（总共 N = 815 名成年人，通过美国 Amazon Mechanical Turk 招募）来调查人们在自行判断定量信息被误报时是否会忽略这些信息。参与者招募了在线查看的从高斯分布中采样的值集来估计潜在的均值。他们试图忽略无效信息，这些信息是插入值序列中的异常值。结果表明参与者能够发现异常值。尽管如此，参与者的估计仍然偏向异常值的方向，即使他们最确定自己检测到了无效信息。视觉警告提示和不同任务场景的添加并没有完全消除系统性高估和低估。这些发现表明，个人在形成信念时可能会纳入他们本想忽略的无效信息。