Anger increases susceptibility to misinformation: Anger did not affect either recognition or source accuracy for true details about the initial event, but suggestibility for false details increased with anger

Greenstein, M., & Franklin, N. (2020). Anger increases susceptibility to misinformation. Experimental Psychology, 67(3), 202–209. https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000489

Abstract: The effect of anger on acceptance of false details was examined using a three-phase misinformation paradigm. Participants viewed an event, were presented with schema-consistent and schema-irrelevant misinformation about it, and were given a surprise source monitoring test to examine the acceptance of the suggested material. Between each phase of the experiment, they performed a task that either induced anger or maintained a neutral mood. Participants showed greater susceptibility to schema-consistent than schema-irrelevant misinformation. Anger did not affect either recognition or source accuracy for true details about the initial event, but suggestibility for false details increased with anger. In spite of this increase in source errors (i.e., misinformation acceptance), both confidence in the accuracy of source attributions and decision speed for incorrect judgments also increased with anger. Implications are discussed with respect to both the general effects of anger and real-world applications such as eyewitness memory.

Discussion

Anger is an approach-oriented emotion adapted to guide
behavior under circumstances that involve time pressure
and consequences for safety. Because rapid cognition and
disinhibition would support effective action under these
circumstances, we made three predictions for how anger
would impact outcomes in a misinformation paradigm as
follows:
1. Reduced skepticism would increase susceptibility to postevent misinformation.
2. Disinhibition would be manifested as increased confidence.
3. More streamlined cognition would lead to faster responding.

We found evidence for all three of these outcomes.
When time is of the essence, there is value in suppressing
self-doubt to act quickly and decisively. While the experiment
did not call for urgent action, the cognitive adaptations
associated with anger should, as observed,
impact cognition pervasively, suggesting that these findings
reflect a broad cognitive style associated with anger.
Furthermore, anger increased suggestibility for schemairrelevant
and schema-consistent details, demonstrating
its broad impact on cognition.
Interestingly, anger did not seem to impair memory for
events that actually did occur as it affected neither recognition
memory nor source accuracy for details actually
present in the original event. Instead, anger impaired the
ability to dismiss errors that were subsequently suggested.
This is consistent with the characterization of anger as
streamlining cognition in support of action rather than
additional reflection. Coupled with the observed rapid and
confident memory decisions, this points to a constellation
of risks associated with anger’s impact on memory.
Because anger affected confidence and accuracy in
opposite directions, it affected the confidence–accuracy
relationship. The two are traditionally moderately correlated,
as observed in the neutral condition. Anger, however,
led to the opposite pattern where increased
confidence was associated with decreased accuracy. To
the extent that people use expressed confidence to judge
the reliability of other people’s memory (Wells et al., 1979),
this may be problematic. Because anger did not impair
participants’ source accuracy for events that actually had
occurred in the Film, outside observers with corroborating
evidence of those film details would have a basis for accepting
the participants’ confident additional claims. This
is precisely the sort of situation that jurors are exposed to
in a courtroom.
The current work has clear implications for witness
memory. Crimes can induce anger (Matsumoto & Hwang,
2015) and are associated with a risk of highly consequential
memory impairment (Deffenbacher et al., 2004).
Following an incident, witness memory is subject to
postevent input, such as cowitness accounts or leading
questions, which can distort memory (e.g., Roediger et al.,
2001; Wade et al., 2002). With each discussion or interview
comes renewed opportunity for misinformation effects,
which our results suggest will disproportionately
impact angry witnesses. To the extent that an angry witness
becomes more prone to errors of action (incorporating
postevent information into memory) rather than
inaction (rejecting new information), their memory reports
may become particularly unreliable.
Indeed, for at least three reasons, the observed effects
may underpredict those that would occur following a
crime. First, criminal cases may involve more repetition of
and elaboration upon postevent misinformation than occurred
in this experiment. For instance, criminal cases that
lead to prosecution generally involve multiple interviews
of the same eyewitness (e.g., by police officers, detectives,
and prosecutors). Separate from these, witnesses often
also relate details of the incident to cowitnesses, family,
and friends and potentially receive incorrectly suggested
details from these sources as well. Second, the anger
experienced in a criminal case is likely directed at the
source of the memory (the perpetrator) rather than at an
incidental target (the experimenter). Although this work
demonstrates that anger affects processing of content
unrelated to the source of the anger, it is possible that the
effects increase for related content. Third, the anger experienced
by many victims and witnesses would likely
exceed that of our laboratory participants. Inasmuch as the
degree of anger that affects the tendency to fall prey to
these biases, the potentially angrier victims and other
witnesses may be impacted more than our participants
were. It is also possible for the above factors to interact
with one another, further increasing risk in real-world
situations.
With regard to schematicity, participants in both
emotion induction conditions accepted more schemaconsistent
than schema-irrelevant misinformation. The
streamlined cognitive processing style associated with
anger did not increase preexisting tendencies to incorporate
this type of information into memory (Kleider
et al., 2008), although this may also reflect the high
plausibility of both schematic and schema-irrelevant
items. While this work intentionally sought to use only
highly plausible misinformation, future research should
continue to explore this question using less plausible
misinformation.
The current findings, coupled with the frequency with
which anger is experienced (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2015),
call for a greater understanding of its effects on memory.
Much is already known about memory’s vulnerability to
misinformation, and the current work finds that anger can
increase the frequency of these errors as well as one’s
confidence in them. Applied to criminal contexts, a richly
detailed witness report, combined with high confidence in
the associated memory, can contribute to heightened
perception of credibility in the eyes of cowitnesses, investigators,
judges, and jurors (Wells et al., 1979). Thus,
the dangers of anger, particularly in the justice system,
where the errors have real consequences, appear to be
more serious than previously understood.