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“That’s just like, your opinion, man”: the illusory truth effect on opinions
With the expanse of technology, people are constantly exposed to an abundance of information. Of vital importance is to understand how people assess the truthfulness of such information. One indicator of perceived truthfulness seems to be whether it is repeated. That is, people tend to perceive repe...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10257371/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37300704 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01845-5 |
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author | Riesthuis, Paul Woods, Josh |
author_facet | Riesthuis, Paul Woods, Josh |
author_sort | Riesthuis, Paul |
collection | PubMed |
description | With the expanse of technology, people are constantly exposed to an abundance of information. Of vital importance is to understand how people assess the truthfulness of such information. One indicator of perceived truthfulness seems to be whether it is repeated. That is, people tend to perceive repeated information, regardless of its veracity, as more truthful than new information, also known as the illusory truth effect. In the present study, we examined whether such effect is also observed for opinions and whether the manner in which the information is encoded influenced the illusory truth effect. Across three experiments, participants (n = 552) were presented with a list of true information, misinformation, general opinion, and/or social–political opinion statements. First, participants were either instructed to indicate whether the presented statement was a fact or opinion based on its syntax structure (Exp. 1 & 2) or assign each statement to a topic category (Exp. 3). Subsequently, participants rated the truthfulness of various new and repeated statements. Results showed that repeated information, regardless of the type of information, received higher subjective truth ratings when participants simply encoded them by assigning each statement to a topic. However, when general and social–political opinions were encoded as an opinion, we found no evidence of such effect. Moreover, we found a reversed illusory truth effect for general opinion statements when only considering information that was encoded as an opinion. These findings suggest that how information is encoded plays a crucial role in evaluating truth. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10257371 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Springer Berlin Heidelberg |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-102573712023-06-12 “That’s just like, your opinion, man”: the illusory truth effect on opinions Riesthuis, Paul Woods, Josh Psychol Res Research With the expanse of technology, people are constantly exposed to an abundance of information. Of vital importance is to understand how people assess the truthfulness of such information. One indicator of perceived truthfulness seems to be whether it is repeated. That is, people tend to perceive repeated information, regardless of its veracity, as more truthful than new information, also known as the illusory truth effect. In the present study, we examined whether such effect is also observed for opinions and whether the manner in which the information is encoded influenced the illusory truth effect. Across three experiments, participants (n = 552) were presented with a list of true information, misinformation, general opinion, and/or social–political opinion statements. First, participants were either instructed to indicate whether the presented statement was a fact or opinion based on its syntax structure (Exp. 1 & 2) or assign each statement to a topic category (Exp. 3). Subsequently, participants rated the truthfulness of various new and repeated statements. Results showed that repeated information, regardless of the type of information, received higher subjective truth ratings when participants simply encoded them by assigning each statement to a topic. However, when general and social–political opinions were encoded as an opinion, we found no evidence of such effect. Moreover, we found a reversed illusory truth effect for general opinion statements when only considering information that was encoded as an opinion. These findings suggest that how information is encoded plays a crucial role in evaluating truth. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2023-06-10 /pmc/articles/PMC10257371/ /pubmed/37300704 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01845-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Research Riesthuis, Paul Woods, Josh “That’s just like, your opinion, man”: the illusory truth effect on opinions |
title | “That’s just like, your opinion, man”: the illusory truth effect on opinions |
title_full | “That’s just like, your opinion, man”: the illusory truth effect on opinions |
title_fullStr | “That’s just like, your opinion, man”: the illusory truth effect on opinions |
title_full_unstemmed | “That’s just like, your opinion, man”: the illusory truth effect on opinions |
title_short | “That’s just like, your opinion, man”: the illusory truth effect on opinions |
title_sort | “that’s just like, your opinion, man”: the illusory truth effect on opinions |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10257371/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37300704 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01845-5 |
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