![]() ![]() In response to this health crisis, false information has been widely circulated. More recently, there has been concern about the consequences of peoples’ beliefs in misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Problematically, as a result of this false belief, some people also have the misperception that “a little brain damage” is unimportant (Guilmette and Paglia 2004). For example, according to a recent survey of teachers in Great Britain and The Netherlands, 48 percent and 46 percent, respectively, falsely believed that people only use ten percent of their brains (Dekker et al. Together these experiments show the powerful effect of simple repetition in affecting our judgments of truth. In both experiments, we found that the more often that participants had previously encountered the trivia statement, the more truthful they rated it to be, but the largest increases in perceived truth occurred when people encountered a statement for the second time. One week later, we showed participants these same facts along with new facts and asked them to rate their truthfulness. In Experiment 2, the trivia statements were shown either 1, 9, 18, or 27 times. In Experiment 1, the trivia statements were shown either 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9 times. In each experiment, we asked participants to read trivia statements such as “ The gestation period of a giraffe is 425 days”. The goal of the current research was to examine how a larger number of repeated exposures affects our judgments of truth. However, in the real world, claims are often encountered at much higher repetition rates. Although a large number of studies have shown that the illusory truth effect occurs, very little research has used more than three repetitions. This is known as the illusory truth effect, and it helps explain why advertisements and propaganda work, and also why people believe fake news to be true. ![]() People tend to perceive claims as truer if they have been exposed to them before. Repetition can affect beliefs about truth. These findings add to our theoretical understanding of the illusory truth effect and have applications for advertising, politics, and the propagation of “fake news.” The largest increase in perceived truth came from encountering a statement for the second time, and beyond this were incrementally smaller increases in perceived truth for each additional repetition. However, these truth rating increases were logarithmic in shape. ![]() In both experiments, we found that perceived truthfulness increased as the number of repetitions increased. Later, participants rated the truthfulness of the previously seen statements and of new statements. In Experiment 1, we showed participants trivia statements up to 9 times and in Experiment 2 statements were shown up to 27 times. To address this limitation, we conducted two experiments using a larger number of repetitions. Although the illusory truth effect is a robust phenomenon, almost all studies examining it have used three or fewer repetitions. Because fluency and truth are frequently correlated in the real world, people learn to use processing fluency as a marker for truthfulness. This finding is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing fluency. ![]() Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. ![]()
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