School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2012 Oct;19(5):969-74. doi: 10.3758/s13423-012-0292-0.
When people evaluate claims, they often rely on what comedian Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness," or subjective feelings of truth. In four experiments, we examined the impact of nonprobative information on truthiness. In Experiments 1A and 1B, people saw familiar and unfamiliar celebrity names and, for each, quickly responded "true" or "false" to the (between-subjects) claim "This famous person is alive" or "This famous person is dead." Within subjects, some of the names appeared with a photo of the celebrity engaged in his or her profession, whereas other names appeared alone. For unfamiliar celebrity names, photos increased the likelihood that the subjects would judge the claim to be true. Moreover, the same photos inflated the subjective truth of both the "alive" and "dead" claims, suggesting that photos did not produce an "alive bias" but rather a "truth bias." Experiment 2 showed that photos and verbal information similarly inflated truthiness, suggesting that the effect is not peculiar to photographs per se. Experiment 3 demonstrated that nonprobative photos can also enhance the truthiness of general knowledge claims (e.g., Giraffes are the only mammals that cannot jump). These effects add to a growing literature on how nonprobative information can inflate subjective feelings of truth.
当人们评估说法时，他们常常依赖于喜剧演员斯蒂芬·科尔伯特（Stephen Colbert）所谓的“真实性”，或者说对真实性的主观感受。在四项实验中，我们研究了非概率信息对真实性的影响。在实验 1A 和 1B 中，人们看到了熟悉和不熟悉的名人名字，并对每个名字快速做出“是”或“否”的反应，反应的内容是（被试间）“这个名人还活着”或“这个名人已经去世”。在实验 1A 和 1B 中，主体内的一些名字旁边会出现名人从事其职业的照片，而其他名字则单独出现。对于不熟悉的名人名字，照片增加了被试判断说法为真的可能性。此外，同样的照片还夸大了“活着”和“去世”说法的主观真实性，这表明照片并没有产生“活着的偏见”，而是产生了“真实性偏见”。实验 2 表明，照片和口头信息同样夸大了真实性，这表明这种效果并非照片本身所特有。实验 3 表明，非概率照片也可以增强一般知识说法的真实性（例如，长颈鹿是唯一不能跳跃的哺乳动物）。这些影响增加了关于非概率信息如何夸大主观真实性的不断增长的文献。
