More than true or false: The effects of prior beliefs on strategic and nonstrategic processing of socioscientific claims.

Readers are often confronted with one-sided, conflicting, or even false information when engaging with socioscientific issues. Based on the notion that validation of information is a routine part of comprehension, we conducted four experiments to investigate how explicit validity judgments and nonstrategic validation of (mis)information on socioscientific issues are affected by the interaction between belief consistency and factual accuracy. Experiment 1 (n = 73) and Experiment 2 (n = 50) used a validity judgment task and found that participants made more errors in judging false belief-consistent claims and needed more time to correctly respond to true but belief-inconsistent and to false but belief-consistent claims. Experiment 3 (n = 84) used the epistemic Stroop task to investigate whether readers' beliefs and knowledge also influence nonstrategic validation, even when readers' task does not require an explicit judgment of validity or belief consistency. In the epistemic Stroop task, affirmative responses did not differ significantly between true and false belief-consistent claims, whereas they were longer for false belief-inconsistent claims. Experiment 4 (n = 226) replicated the results for both tasks, controlling for readers' prior knowledge. The results suggest that beliefs may bias explicit validity judgments, but also the nonstrategic processing of socioscientific claims.