People are influenced by unreliable information yet remain aware of its influence on their decisions

People are influenced by unreliable information yet remain aware of its influence on their decisions Lisa Lock Scientific Editor Andrew Zinin Chief Editor Every day, people make decisions based on information obtained from social media, news outlets, online reviews and interpersonal communication, all of which vary in reliability. Numerical indicators and labels designed to convey information reliability, such as user ratings and fact-checking systems, have become increasingly common online. However, an important question remains: When reliability is explicitly stated, do people use this information appropriately for making decisions? Researchers at University of Tsukuba and Queen Mary University of London conducted an experiment to determine the influence of unreliable information. Participants completed a decision-making task in which each information source was accompanied by a numerical value indicating the probability that the source would provide the correct information. Participants were asked to integrate information from multiple sources when making a judgment. The results showed that participants assigned greater weight to sources with higher reliability but did not use the stated reliability values exactly as they were presented. Notably, information labeled as having a 50% probability of being correct, which should theoretically provide no useful basis for decision-making, still biased participants' choices toward the content of that information. In a separate experiment, participants were also asked to report how strongly they believed each source had influenced their judgment. The results indicated that the participants could often recognize, to some extent, when unreliable information had affected their decisions. Although they were influenced by unreliable information, they also showed some metacognitive awareness of that influence. These findings, published in PLOS Computational Biology, highlight the importance of providing explicit information reliability indicators and understanding how people interpret and integrate this information during decision-making. The results may help explain how individuals respond to information of varying trustworthiness in today's information environments. Publication details Keiji Ota et al., How does explicit reliability guide choices? Effect of trustworthiness on choice and metacognition, PLOS Computational Biology (2026). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014818 Journal information: PLoS Computational Biology Provided by University of Tsukuba