People are more inclined to believe that information is true if they have encountered it before. Little is known about whether this illusory truth effect is influenced by individual differences in cognition. In seven studies (combined N = 2,196), using both trivia statements (Studies 1-6) and partisan news headlines (Study 7), we investigate moderation by three factors that have been shown to play a critical role in epistemic processes: cognitive ability (Studies 1, 2, 5), need for cognitive closure (Study 1), and cognitive style, that is, reliance on intuitive versus analytic thinking (Studies 1, 3-7). All studies showed a significant illusory truth effect, but there was no evidence for moderation by any of the cognitive measures across studies. These results indicate that the illusory truth effect is robust to individual differences in cognitive ability, need for cognitive closure, and cognitive style.
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contextual levels (regional and national) of right-wing climate, and three types of outgroup attitudes (i.e., age-, ethnicity-, and gender-based), the analyses consistently revealed crosslevel interactions, showing a strong association between right-wing attitudes and negative outgroup attitudes at the individual level in contexts with a low right-wing climate, whereas this relationship is weaker and often even absent in contexts with a high right-wing climate.These cross-level interactions remained significant after controlling for statistical artefacts (i.e., restriction of range and outliers). The authors propose norm setting as the mobilizing mechanism through which a right-wing climate develops and curbs the influence of individual right-wing social-ideological attitudes on outgroup attitudes.
3The mobilizing effect of right-wing ideological climates: Cross-level interaction effects on different types of outgroup attitudes Research on negative outgroup attitudes and its determinants has been on the forefront of scientific research in social psychology since the 1950s (e.g., Allport, 1954). Several personality traits and social-ideological attitudes have been proposed as important bases of how people think and feel about outgroups, such as authoritarianism (Adorno, Frenkel-
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