Repetition and Truth: Understanding Illusory Truth Effect
Recognizing the Bias Behind Advertising, Propaganda, and Fake News
We have touched on many cognitive biases in Optimistic Learner; Implicit Bias, Confirmation Bias, Optimism Bias, and Ingroup Bias. These are largely the result of mental shortcuts humans evolved to survive. The goal of highlighting them is to make them more recognizable and hopefully diminish their harmful effects. In this article, we will focus on understanding Illusory Truth Effect and how it relates to advertising, propaganda, and the phenomenon of fake news.
An Introduction to Illusory Truth Effect
Illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information to be true after repeated exposure. It was first identified in 1977 by Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino.
Forty college students rated how certain they were that each of sixty statements was true or false. The statements were samples from a variety of areas of knowledge. And they were plausible but unlikely to be specifically known by most college students.
Students gave ratings on three occasions at two-week intervals.
Embedded in the list were statements that were either repeated across sessions or not. For both true and false statements, there was a significant increase in the validity judgments for the repeated statements and no change for the nonrepeated statements 1.
Further studies have supported and expanded on these findings.
Recent Research and Findings
Recent research from Aumyo Hassan and Sarah J. Barber expanded on repetition and concluded that “perceived truthfulness increased as the number of repetitions increased, and in line with our predictions, these increases were logarithmic in nature.” In the experiments, “the largest increases in perceived truth came from encountering a statement for the second time. However, beyond this, there were progressively smaller increases in perceived truth for each additional repetition” 2.
In one of two extensive 2020 articles in Psychology Today, Joe Pierre M.D. summarized an article from the Personality and Social Psychology Review saying; “while the perceived credibility of a statement’s source increases perceptions of truth as we might expect, the truth effect persists even when sources are thought to be unreliable and especially when the source of the statement is unclear”3. Essentially, illusory truth effect persists even when people don’t trust the source.
Why Does This Occur?
Psychologists have been interested for several decades in the two modes of thinking.
Keith Stanovich and Richard West, refer to two systems in the mind, System 1 and System 2. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.
The answer to why illusory truth effect occurs, is that it occurs in System 1.
We are cognitively lazy, and with good reason. Preserving energy is important, and our success as a species was dependent on the fast decision-making aided by heuristics (mental shortcuts). As System 1 drains less of our cognitive resources, we have a built-in preference for it.
There is even a term for this; processing fluency refers to the fact that when something is easy to process (as familiar information is), we tend to assume it is accurate 4.
Illusory Truth Effect in the Digital Age
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
Hannah Arendt
Repetition and familiarity are a part of advertising (think of catchy slogans and songs). And Puffing (or puffery) is a term from the advertising world that refers to exaggerating a product’s worth through hyperbole 5.
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Additionally, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the ideas.”
Illusory Truth Effect had been a staple of political propaganda for years before it was even defined. And the power of political propaganda has persisted even with a more aware public.
A Pew Research poll from 2016 found 57 percent of presidential election voters believed crime across the US had gotten worse since 2008, despite FBI data showing it had fallen by about 20 percent. This is significant. Wasteful public policy can be implemented with few questions from the electorate as a result of an erroneous belief 6.
Knowledge about and the study of Illusory Truth Effect has become more relevant in the digital age. Social media platforms in particular can spread misinformation quickly to a vast number of people. And, as a result, misinformation informs more policy, affects democratic outcomes, and weakens the cohesiveness of societies.
What Can Be Done?
Illusory Truth Effect is a pervasive bias. As we’ve covered it can persist even when the sources are not trusted. Consequently, it is difficult to avoid.
Advice on overcoming this bias is both simple and challenging.
Simple in explanation but challenging in practice.
- Critical Thinking: We are inundated with more information than previous points in history and it can be very easy to let false information in. When we fail to think critically we are more likely to succumb to Illusory Truth Effect
- Fact checks: Fact checking information the first time it is provided reduces the potency of Illusory Truth Effect
Consistent with other biases covered; awareness of the bias is important. Furthermore, the benefits of reading, study, and learning should not be undervalued.
Technology & Relationships
How we perceive, empathize and love each other in the Internet age
As social media continues to evolve, it influences everything from politics, self-esteem, status, and love. Under the increasingly needed scrutiny of this fact, we explore how we might be certain that we are using technology as much as it is using us.
This ebook was created to raise awareness of the impacts of technology on our relationships.
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Sources
- Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, Vol. 16, 1977, Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T.
- The effects of repetition frequency on the illusory truth effect,Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 2021, A. Hassan & S. Barber
- Illusory Truth, Lies, and Political Propaganda, Psychology Today, 2020, Joe Pierre M.D.
- Why do we believe misinformation more easily when it’s repeated many times? The Decision Lab
- What’s Puffery in Advertising? Examples+How it Can Harm your Brand, rockcontent, 2021
- Want to Make a Lie Seem True? Say It Again. And Again. And Again, By Emily Dreyfuss, Wired, 2017
