The Transmission of Reliable and Unreliable Information*

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Graeber, Thomas; Noy, Shakked; Roth, Christopher
• 署名单位: University of Zurich
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjag037
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: WRITTEN; SPOKEN; COMMUNICATION; memory

摘要

Information often spreads and influences beliefs regardless of its reliability. We show that this occurs in part because indicators of reliability tend to be lost in the process of word-of-mouth transmission. We conduct controlled experiments where participants listen to economic forecasts and pass them on through voice messages. Other participants listen either to original or transmitted audio recordings and report incentivized beliefs. Across various transmitter incentive schemes, a claim's reliability is lost in transmission much more than the claim itself. Reliable and unreliable information, once filtered through transmission, affect listeners' beliefs similarly. Mechanism experiments show that reliability is lost not because it is perceived as less relevant or harder to transmit but because it is less likely to come to mind during transmission. Evidence from our experiments, a large corpus of everyday conversations, and economic TV news shows that contextual cues can bring reliability to mind and induce its transmission, but situations in which people share information seldom contain such cues.