Truthiness and falsiness of trivia claims depend on judgmental contexts.

Abstract

When people rapidly judge the truth of claims presented with or without related but nonprobative photos, the photos tend to inflate the subjective truth of those claims--a "truthiness" effect (Newman et al., 2012). For example, people more often judged the claim "Macadamia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches" to be true when the claim appeared with a photo of a bowl of macadamia nuts than when it appeared alone. We report several replications of that effect and 3 qualitatively new findings: (a) in a within-subjects design, when people judged claims paired with a mix of related, unrelated, or no photos, related photos produced truthiness but unrelated photos had no significant effect relative to no photos; (b) in a mixed design, when people judged claims paired with related (or unrelated) and no photos, related photos produced truthiness and unrelated photos produced "falseness;" and (c) in a fully between design, when people judged claims paired with either related, unrelated, or no photos, neither truthiness nor falsiness occurred. Our results suggest that photos influence people's judgments when a discrepancy arises in the expected ease of processing, and also support a mechanism in which-against a backdrop of an expected standard-related photos help people generate pseudoevidence to support claims.

Evidence that photos promote rosiness for claims about the future

“…No significant Photo × Claim interaction emerged in either Experiment 1A or 1B, both Fs < 1.32, but the pattern suggests that photos exerted more of an influence on the Bincrease^than on the Bdecrease^claim (a pattern that we replicated in subsequent experiments). Taken together, our findings fit with recent research showing that nonprobative photos can promote the truthiness of associated claims (Fenn et al, 2013;Newman et al, 2012;Newman et al, 2015) Did subjects have any insight into the way that photos biased them? When we asked subjects at the end of Experiment 1A how the photographs influenced their decisions, 1 52 % of the people said the photographs helped them understand what the commodity was, 10 % told us that the photo helped them imagine the commodity, and only 10 % reported that the photo added credibility to the claim (another 28 % said that the photo did nothing or gave a different explanation, such as that the photo made them respond more slowly).…”

“…The general finding is that when people make rapid judgments about the truth of a claim, nonprobative but relevant photos nudge them toward believing that claim-an effect known as Btruthiness.^This Btruthiness^research, too, fits with the idea that nonprobative photos help people generate thoughts and images related to a claim. In turn, a bias to confirm a claim may encourage people to construe these mental products and the ease of generating them as evidence that the claim is true (Newman et al, 2012;Newman et al, 2015). Truthiness research also suggests that nonprobative photos bias judgments about the past and present by what seem to be similar processes-processes like those we know cause future scenarios to seem true.…”

“…1 We had 68 responses to this follow-up question. 2 We determined the N on the basis of previous research with photos and past judgments on Mturk (e.g., Newman et al, 2015). Fig.…”

Nonprobative photos rapidly lead people to believe claims about their own (and other people’s) pasts

“…4 and 5) show that, if anything, photos made negative claims less believable. That pattern fits with recent work showing that pairing trivia claims with unrelated photos (e.g., a claim about macadamia nuts with a picture of a trash can) can also decrease belief (Newman et al, 2015). The unrelated photos probably worked by making it feel difficult to bring related information to mind, which people interpreted as evidence against the idea that the claims were true (Unkelbach, 2007).…”

Reception and willingness to share pseudo‐profound bullshit and their relation to other epistemically suspect beliefs and cognitive ability in Slovakia and Romania

“…The perceived veracity of bullshit statements may also be influenced by other information, including authorship or visual content paired with bullshit statements. The perceived veracity or profundity of bullshit statements is not based on evidence, it usually relates to a concept of truthiness in which the truth of a statement is judged by gut feeling and this feeling can be manipulated by pairing statements with relevant or irrelevant photos or by giving authors pseudonyms that are easily pronounced (Newman et al, , ). Further research could examine the effect of this kind of paired information on the perceived profundity or veracity of bullshit statements or on willingness to share them.…”