Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, Ethnic Studies & Psychology Building, San Francisco, 94132, California, USA.
Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 5010, Atlanta, GA, 30302, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2021 May 13;6(1):38. doi: 10.1186/s41235-021-00301-5.
Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing fluency. Because fluency and truth are frequently correlated in the real world, people learn to use processing fluency as a marker for truthfulness. Although the illusory truth effect is a robust phenomenon, almost all studies examining it have used three or fewer repetitions. To address this limitation, we conducted two experiments using a larger number of repetitions. In Experiment 1, we showed participants trivia statements up to 9 times and in Experiment 2 statements were shown up to 27 times. Later, participants rated the truthfulness of the previously seen statements and of new statements. In both experiments, we found that perceived truthfulness increased as the number of repetitions increased. However, these truth rating increases were logarithmic in shape. 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. These findings add to our theoretical understanding of the illusory truth effect and have applications for advertising, politics, and the propagation of "fake news."
重复的信息通常被认为比新信息更真实。这种现象被称为虚幻真实效应，通常认为这是因为重复会增加处理流畅度。由于流畅度和真实性在现实世界中经常相关，人们学会将处理流畅度用作真实性的标志。尽管虚幻真实效应是一种强大的现象，但几乎所有研究该效应的研究都使用了三个或更少的重复次数。为了解决这个限制，我们进行了两项实验，使用了更多的重复次数。在实验 1 中，我们向参与者展示了琐事陈述，最多重复 9 次，在实验 2 中，陈述最多重复 27 次。之后，参与者对之前看到的陈述和新陈述的真实性进行了评价。在这两项实验中，我们发现，随着重复次数的增加，感知的真实性也随之增加。然而，这些真实性评分的增加呈对数形状。感知真实性的最大增加来自于第二次遇到陈述，此后，每次额外重复的感知真实性增加都逐渐减小。这些发现增加了我们对虚幻真实效应的理论理解，并对广告、政治和“假新闻”的传播具有应用价值。
