Judging Truth

Abstract

Deceptive claims surround us, embedded in fake news, advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. How do people know what to believe? Truth judgments reflect inferences drawn from three types of information: base rates, feelings, and consistency with information retrieved from memory. First, people exhibit a bias to accept incoming information, because most claims in our environments are true. Second, people interpret feelings, like ease of processing, as evidence of truth. And third, people can (but do not always) consider whether assertions match facts and source information stored in memory. This three-part framework predicts specific illusions (e.g., truthiness, illusory truth), offers ways to correct stubborn misconceptions, and suggests the importance of converging cues in a post-truth world, where falsehoods travel further and faster than the truth.

An initial accuracy focus reduces the effect of prior exposure on perceived accuracy of news headlines

“…Brashier and Marsh ( 2020 ) reviewed the literature on how people judge truth. They identified three cues that influence truth judgments: base rates, memories, and feelings.…”

“…Specifically, participants experience more positive feelings with politically concordant and more negative feelings with politically discordant headlines. Collectively then, based on the model described by Brashier and Marsh ( 2020 ), we believe that participants start with a base rate biased toward rating headlines as accurate and then update them based on a memory search for relevant information and the feelings that accompany the headlines.…”

Mask Mandates, Misinformation, and Data Voids in Local News Coverage of COVID-19

“…When someone receives new information, they can choose to reject the information as false or believe the information is true and update their cognitive models in a Bayesian-model of updating prior knowledge (Brashier and Marsh, 2020). Whether or not someone accepts the new information can depend on if they are engaging in directionally motivated reasoning or accuracy motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990).…”

“…Additionally, people develop a fluency in the misinformation that sometimes does not have to be a repeated statement, but rather a cognitive perception. For example, statements in a bold typeface are rated as truer than others, and statements that rhyme are also rated as truer, in addition to other perception effects (Brashier and Marsh, 2020). The illusory truth effect presents a danger to any news coverage of uncertain events like the coronavirus pandemic.…”

Holistic Causal Learning with Causal Graphs: A Credible Method for Study Design and Preregistration in the Social Sciences

“…Existing research shows that causal thinking is deeply connected to human thought processes (Sloman and Lagnado 2015). Causality involves assigning meaning to events, an endeavor that in fact is part of the definition of rational thought (Brashier and Marsh 2020). Perhaps because it is so foundational to how we process the world, we also have trouble encompassing precisely what we mean when we say a relation is causal versus spurious.…”