| dc.description.abstract | How do people decide what is true and what is false? Decades of psychological research shows that one factor affecting these judgements is repetition: the more a person sees a statement, the more likely they are to believe it. This illusory truth effect has typically been explained in terms of low-level cognitive process. For instance, repetition makes statements easier to comprehend, and people may interpret this ease of conceptual processing as a cue that the statement is likely true. However, these explanations do not account for the possibility that repeated statements may also be associated with social information. For example, a statement may be repeated by a source that is trustworthy or untrustworthy, and it may be repeated because many different people endorse it or because a single source is making the same claim over and over again. The goal of this dissertation is to examine the role of these social factors (source trustworthiness and social consensus) in the relationship between repetition and belief. Chapter 2 reports five experiments examining how repetition of statements by trustworthy versus untrustworthy sources affects belief. This chapter shows that, once a statement has been encountered, it will seem more believable on repeated exposure—whether that exposure comes from a trustworthy or untrustworthy source. However, when a statement is initially encountered from an untrustworthy (versus trustworthy) source, that exposure will be less likely to increase belief when the statement is later repeated, especially when the initial source is particularly memorable and/or unreliable. Chapter 3 reports three experiments examining how repetition of a statement by one source or many affects belief. This chapter shows that both kinds of repetition affect belief similarly, contrary to theories of social influence suggesting that people alter their thoughts and behaviors in line with what is socially agreed upon. Overall, this dissertation helps link theories focusing on the role of lower-level cognitive processes and higher-level social inferences in judgments of truth and contributes to our understanding how people form beliefs from the information in their social environments. | |
