Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements
Name
13423_2019_1651_ReferencePDF.pdf
Size
1.15 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e109c21fc38e03d3ce0efcb412b9fa95
Author(s)
Fazio, Lisa K.
Rand, David Gertler
Pennycook, Gordon
Date Issued
August 2019
Journal
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Fazio, Lisa K. et al. "Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 26, 5 (October 2019): 1705–1710 © 2019 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Repetition increases the likelihood that a statement will be judged as true. This illusory truth effect is well established; however, it has been argued that repetition will not affect belief in unambiguous statements. When individuals are faced with obviously true or false statements, repetition should have no impact. We report a simulation study and a preregistered experiment that investigate this idea. Contrary to many intuitions, our results suggest that belief in all statements is increased by repetition. The observed illusory truth effect is largest for ambiguous items, but this can be explained by the psychometric properties of the task, rather than an underlying psychological mechanism that blocks the impact of repetition for implausible items. Our results indicate that the illusory truth effect is highly robust and occurs across all levels of plausibility. Therefore, even highly implausible statements will become more plausible with enough repetition.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01651-4
