By Holly Martin
Have you ever procrastinated with studying the night before an exam thinking you understood what was going to be on it but once you get your exam score it’s lower than you were anticipating it to be? Almost all of us have been in a similar position where we either do not feel the need to study in general since we understand the curriculum that we have learned in class or do not feel the need to look over our notes, textbooks, or other resources. Though most of the time the answer that you were one hundred percent accurate on and you thought you knew so well happens to be incorrect. This concept of getting that wrong answer on your exam when you just had the intuition of getting it right is known as the misinformation effect. The Misinformation Effect is the tendency for information received after an event to interfere with one’s memory of the original happenings (1). There are many conflicts within the misinformation effect that may have got our minds to have a correct approach to certain circumstances within what we thought we knew within our studying but substantially it does not always happen to be the plan or the outcome we were hoping to get.
How Does The Misinformation Effect Happen In Your Studies When You Can’t Even Notice?
The Misinformation effect is almost always applied every day when you are at college in or out of a class setting. In some occurrences when you do not know about something you tend to run to someone else that is in class rather than texting them, on the phone, or conversation you may have in person. You might tend to ask others questions such as “What did we learn in class again today” or “What did the professor go over today again?” The information source also provides important social cues that influence belief formation. In general, messages are more persuasive and seem more true when they come from sources perceived to be more credible than non-credible (2).
Your peers usually tend to tell you their aspect of what they had remembered from class and what they had learned but it does not all comply with the curriculum that the professor had taught you correctly. People trust human information sources more if they perceive the sources as attractive, powerful, and similar to themselves (2). Since our peers think similarly to our thinking this can affect your study process and progression of understanding the concepts you are learning due to the misinformation that was brought up by your peers instead of understanding what the professor or other professional had taught throughout the class that you might have been having a hard time understanding. Students have a hard time understanding how memories are not exact, video-recording-like representations of an event (3). We tend to believe that the things supplied by other individuals are the correct way of learning and understanding. You will also learn the main concepts behind social influences and how they play a role in what is being shown or told to you which can negatively impact your understanding and learning if you are not getting told things from a professional standpoint. It appears that the witness may have inferred a false memory by integrating information from a variety of sources(3). By being told certain information by other individuals you are comfortable with and can understand can more than likely teach you the wrong way of learning material more than the right way.
How To Imply Correct Studying Habits
Studying techniques and the way you use your time management throughout college which is the main way of setting you up for success. Implying good studying habits can make things easier to remember on future testing or understanding the curriculum in the classroom environment. Taking notes, reading textbook material, and talking to the professor are materials that can make your learning way more effective, and the things you do throughout the class are one of the ways for the things you are learning to be more effective throughout learning material you are unfamiliar with. Though In this course Dr.Swan takes the extra step to be able to help you understand the things being taught in class and what you can still work on by doing retrieval practices and other in-class activities to help with understanding each concept throughout the course. Practicing a retrieving an event may provide a practical method for protecting memory from the influence of misinformation, given the encoding factors likely cannot be controlled in eyewitness situations(4).
Being able to become familiar with the things that are constantly talked about can make you remember the material that is important and could be used for future references down the line in your education however, you need to make sure to not overlap some material with other material in psychology since a lot of the terminology is somewhat the same in context. Overlapping physical features present at the time and encoding alone, however, do not yield the same beneficial memory effects as the instructions to mentally reinstate the context in which misinformation is presented on recall of the misinformation about the event is presented on recall of the misinformation about the event(5). By doing your role as a student by studying the material, reading the text concepts, taking notes, and getting help from a professional you will proceed to progress in almost everything you learn about. But always remember to listen to the text and don’t take the risk of instantly listen to everything your brain tells you and wants you to.
References
1) Cherry, K. (2022, May 11). How does misinformation influence our memories of events? Verywell Mind. Retrieved April 30, 2023, from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-misinformation-effect-2795353
2) Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Schmid, P., Fazio, L. K., Brashier, N., Kendeou, P., Vraga, E. K., & Amazeen, M. A. (2022, January 12). The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction. Nature News. Retrieved April 30, 2023, from https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-021-00006-y
3) Teaching and experiencing the misinformation effect: A classroom … – ed. (n.d.). Retrieved April 30, 2023, from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ932188.pdf
4)Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Schmid, P., Fazio, L. K., Brashier, N., Kendeou, P., Vraga, E. K., & Amazeen, M. A. (2022, January 12). The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction. Nature News. Retrieved April 30, 2023, from https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-021-00006-y
5)Mental reinstatement of the misinformation context and the … (n.d.). Retrieved April 30, 2023, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.886