Experiential fluency and declarative advice jointly inform judgments of truth

Abstract

Processing fluency, the experienced ease of ongoing mental operations, influences judgments such as frequency, monetary value, or truth. Most experiments keep to-be-judged stimuli ambiguous with regards to these judgment dimensions. In real life, however, people usually have declarative information about these stimuli beyond the experiential processing information. Here, we address how experiential fluency information may inform truth judgments in the presence of declarative advice information. Four experiments show that fluency influences judged truth even when advice about the statements' truth is continuously available and labeled as highly valid; the influence follows a linear cue integration pattern for two orthogonal cues (i.e., experiential and declarative information). These data underline the importance of processing fluency as an explanatory construct in real-life judgements and support a cue integration framework to understand fluency effects in judgment and decision making. Fluency_and_Advice 3 Experiential fluency and declarative advice jointly inform judgments of truthProcessing fluency is the experiential component of mental operations such as perceiving, storing, retrieving, or generating information (see Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2013). This fluency experience influences judgments and evaluations from basic dimensions such as stimuli's frequency (e.g.,

Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements

“…These results fit with previous findings suggesting that fluency affects truth judgments independent of prior knowledge and other factors (Fazio et al, 2015;Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018). While participants can, and often do, judge the truth of a statement based on their prior knowledge or source credulity (Begg, Anas, & Farinacci, 1992;Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018), they are also influenced by low-level perceptual cues that impact fluency, such as font color and repetition (Reber & Schwarz, 1999;Unkelbach, 2007). Thus, even when participants are given advice on which statements are true or false from an advisor who is described as being 100% accurate, their truth judgements are still affected by repetition (Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018).…”

“…In fact, in the same study, there was no evidence that the size of the illusory truth effect was affected by the reliability of the advisor. The increase in perceived truth with repetition was equivalent regardless of whether the advisor was described as being 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 or 100% accurate (Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018). Similarly, we found that our results were best explained by a model where all statements show an identical increase as a function of repetition, regardless of plausibility.…”

“…While participants can, and often do, judge the truth of a statement based on their prior knowledge or source credulity (Begg, Anas, & Farinacci, 1992;Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018), they are also influenced by low-level perceptual cues that impact fluency, such as font color and repetition (Reber & Schwarz, 1999;Unkelbach, 2007). Thus, even when participants are given advice on which statements are true or false from an advisor who is described as being 100% accurate, their truth judgements are still affected by repetition (Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018). In fact, in the same study, there was no evidence that the size of the illusory truth effect was affected by the reliability of the advisor.…”

Repetition Increases Perceived Truth Even for Known Falsehoods

“…Another cue is the source of the information. People are less likely to believe statements that come from unreliable sources (Begg, Anas, & Farinacci, 1992;Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018). However, people also rely on other more proximal cues for truth.…”

“…In fact, people continue to rely on these proximal cues, such as repetition, even when they have access to more direct signals of truth such as prior knowledge and source reliability (Fazio et al, 2015;Fazio et al, 2019;Fazio & Sherry, in press;Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018). That is, while people pay attention to cues such as prior knowledge and source credibility when judging truth, they are also affected by proximal cues such as repetition.…”