Mikell Justin, Powell Derek
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
Arizona State University, Glendale, AZ, USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2025 Jan 22;12(1):240716. doi: 10.1098/rsos.240716. eCollection 2025 Jan.
Numerous psychological findings have shown that incidental exposure to ideas makes those ideas seem more true, a finding commonly referred to as the 'illusory truth' effect. Under many accounts of the illusory truth effect, initial exposure to a statement provides a metacognitive feeling of 'fluency' or familiarity that, upon subsequent exposure, leads people to infer that the statement is more likely to be true. However, genuine beliefs do not only affect truth judgements about individual statements, they also imply other beliefs and drive decision-making. Here, we consider whether exposure to 'premise' statements affects people's truth ratings for novel 'implied' statements, a pattern of findings we call the 'illusory implication' effect. We argue these effects would constitute evidence for genuine belief change from incidental exposure and identify a handful of existing findings that offer preliminary support for this claim. Building upon these, we conduct three new preregistered experiments to further test this hypothesis, finding additional evidence that exposure to 'premise' statements affected participants' truth ratings for novel 'implied' statements, including for considerably more distant implications than those previously explored. Our findings suggest that the effects of incidental exposure reach further than previously thought, with potentially consequential implications for concerns around mis- and dis-information.
众多心理学研究结果表明，偶然接触某些观点会使这些观点看起来更真实，这一发现通常被称为“虚幻真实”效应。在许多关于虚幻真实效应的解释中，初次接触某一陈述会产生一种“流畅性”或熟悉感的元认知感受，在后续接触时，会使人们推断该陈述更有可能是真实的。然而，真正的信念不仅会影响对单个陈述的真实性判断，还会暗示其他信念并推动决策。在此，我们探讨接触“前提”陈述是否会影响人们对新的“隐含”陈述的真实性评级，我们将这种研究结果模式称为“虚幻暗示”效应。我们认为，这些效应将构成偶然接触导致真正信念改变的证据，并找出一些现有研究结果为这一观点提供初步支持。在此基础上，我们进行了三项新的预注册实验以进一步检验这一假设，发现了更多证据表明接触“前提”陈述会影响参与者对新的“隐含”陈述的真实性评级，包括比之前研究的更为间接的暗示。我们的研究结果表明，偶然接触的影响比之前认为的更为深远，这可能会对错误信息和虚假信息相关问题产生重要影响。
