In Zurich, does correcting information also correct decisions?
An inaccurate sales figure, a misidentified cause of an incident or an outdated internal rule can be corrected without disappearing from people's reasoning. The management question is specific: how can we check whether a correction changes decisions rather than simply adding to the messages received?
What the literature establishes
Stephan Lewandowsky, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Colleen M. Seifert, Norbert Schwarz and John Cook (2012, Psychological Science in the Public Interest) review research on the continued influence of information after it has been corrected. Someone may acknowledge that information has been withdrawn yet continue to use it when drawing inferences. Their review therefore suggests distinguishing between remembering a correction and incorporating it into reasoning.
Warnings do not always suffice
Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Stephan Lewandowsky and David T. W. Tang (2010, Memory & Cognition) demonstrate experimentally that explicit warnings can reduce this continued influence without eliminating it. Warning people that information may be misleading therefore does not guarantee that their subsequent conclusions will be independent of it. For a manager, marking a document as provisional is a precaution, not a safeguard against its reuse.
The premature conclusion
It would be excessive to conclude that corrections are useless or necessarily reinforce the error. The 2012 review highlights the value of a coherent alternative explanation: withdrawing a presumed cause can otherwise leave a gap in people's understanding of an event. Correcting an incident diagnosis therefore requires specifying what is now established while distinguishing what remains uncertain. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
The experimental research uses narratives and reasoning tasks that do not reproduce the approval processes of a bank, an insurer or an international headquarters. It does not provide an effectiveness rate that can be applied directly to a Zurich team. In practice, a read receipt provides even less evidence that a correction has been incorporated into a decision.
A practical check in Zurich
As part of SHR's Communication programme, a Zurich team in financial services, insurance, tech or a European headquarters could test two formats using a fictional case tailored to its work. Randomly assign participants to receive either a brief correction or a correction presenting the revised facts alongside a substantiated alternative explanation, then give them the same decision task. Measure the proportion of justifications that still draw on the withdrawn information, using a coding framework established before the exercise. This local comparison would not demonstrate general effectiveness, but it would test whether the second format reduces the persistence of the error in this task. To go further: explore the Communication training in Zurich in the canton of Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Communication in Zurich
- communication
- Zurich
- research
- training zurich