Abstract
Repetition increases belief in true and false statements. This “illusory truth effect,” has been documented across dozens of experiments using materials ranging from trivia statements to claims about consumer products to political news. Further, current theories of the effect focus on low-level psychological cues like processing fluency that arise spontaneously and that should affect judgements of truth uniformly for all such types of statements. In contrast to this picture, we find that the size of the illusory truth effect varies for different types of statements, with larger effects occurring when people see banal trivia statements as opposed to political or viral, health-related news headlines. We report six studies (total N = 1,749 US MTurkers) demonstrating this effect or testing potential explanations. We find that these differences appear to be driven by the overall context of the type of statements participants encounter rather than features of each individual statement. These findings speak to the malleable nature of the link between repetition and belief, with repetition being more a more impactful contributor to beliefs in contexts where people are saying some kinds of statements (e.g., trivia statements) than others (e.g., political or health-related news).