Repetition increases both the perceived truth and fakeness of information: An ecological account

Metacognitive experiences as information: Processing fluency in consumer judgment and decision making

“…The available studies indicate that people can draw different inferences from the same metacognitive experience because the experimenter insinuates different lay theories (e.g., Briñol et al., 2006; Winkielman & Schwarz, 2001), the dependent variable brings different lay theories to mind (e.g., Whittlesea et al., 1990) or participants are taught an applicable lay theory through many experimental trials (e.g., Unkelbach, 2007). The latter induction of a lay theory is sometimes credited as being more ecologically valid (e.g., Corneille et al., 2020) but its effects are indistinguishable from other manipulations that render applicable lay theories accessible. Moreover, lay theories that are learned through many experimental trials do not seem to generalize beyond the specific experimental setting and fluency variable used (e.g., Silva et al., 2016); we return to this issue in our discussion of fluency effects on judgments of truth.…”

“…(2020) showed that repetition‐induced fluency can increase the likelihood that a claim is considered “fake news”. In their experiments, participants were asked, “Do you believe that this statement has been previously used as a Fake News on social media?” (Corneille et al., 2020, p. 3). As expected, participants were more likely to believe so when the statement felt familiar due to earlier exposures.…”

“…While we assume that these criteria guide truth judgment in most situations, other criteria and lay theories can be brought to bear. Thus, a statement's apparent familiarity can also suggest that it may be fake news that has been spread on social media (Corneille et al., 2020). As emphasized in Section 2.2., metacognitive experiences provide information and what people conclude from that information depends on which lay theory they apply (Schwarz, 2004).…”

Truth by Repetition … without repetition: Testing the effect of instructed repetition on truth judgments

“…Repeated statements should be judged as more true than new statements overall. In line with prior research (e.g., Unkelbach & Stahl, 2009;Corneille et al, 2020), the effect should not be qualified by the factual truth of the statement. The critical questions were whether a truth effect would be observed in the instructed repetition condition and whether experienced repetition would increase judgments of truth to a larger extent for participants assigned to the experiential condition.…”

“…For example, people might learn an ecological correlation between repetition and truth (Unkelbach, INSTRUCTED REPETITION 21 2006, 2007. Thus, because truth and repetition are correlated, people judge statements that occur more frequently to have a higher probability of being true, and vice-versa (for similar arguments, see Unkelback &Greifeneder, 2013, andUnkelbach, 2010; for a reversal of the truth effect in alternative ecologies, see Corneille et al, 2020). Similarly, people might have lay theories about their processing experiences (e.g., if it is easy to process, it is likely true) and judge the statements accordingly (e.g., Schwarz, 2004).…”