The Transmission of Reliable and Unreliable Information

Information often spreads and influences beliefs regardless of its reliability. We show that this occurs in part because indicators of reliability are disproportionately 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 more than twice as much as the claim itself. Reliable and unreliable information, once filtered through transmission, impact listener beliefs similarly, substantially reducing the efficiency of downstream decisions. 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 experiments, a large corpus of everyday conversations, and economic TV news demonstrate that reliability information is less likely to be cued during transmission and that attempts to retrieve it face greater interference in memory.