False Information (FI) is a critical societal issue, made even more pressing by our inability to mitigate its influence through correction. Researchers Johnson and Seifert (1994, Experiment 1A) penned a seminal paper on this "Continued Influence Effect" (CIE), which they observed in English-speaking participants. In their experiments, one group read a text containing FI that was later retracted (FI group), while another read the same text without FI (control group). Interestingly, even after receiving corrections, participants who read the FI were more likely than their peers to form FI-related inferences about the text. To the best of our knowledge, this finding has never been successfully directly replicated. Given the current replicability crisis plaguing the human sciences, the influence of culture on CIE and the importance of Johnson and Seifert's paradigm in this literature, the reassessment of their findings within a non-English-speaking population appears crucial. The present research investigated the direct replicability of their study with a French-speaking sample, comparing the inferences drawn by an FI group (n = 21) to those made by a control group (n = 23). The results confirm those of the original study, supporting the validity of Johnson and Seifert's paradigm (1994) and extending its applicability to a French-speaking population.
Keywords: Continued Influence Effect; False information; Replication.
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