Truthiness and Falsiness of Trivia Claims Depend on Judgmental Contexts

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 41; no. 5; pp. 1337 - 1348
• Main Authors: Newman, Eryn J, Garry, Maryanne, Unkelbach, Christian, Bernstein, Daniel M, Lindsay, D. Stephen, Nash, Robert A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Psychological Association 01.09.2015
• Subjects: Abstract Reasoning; Accuracy; Analysis of Variance; Cognitive Processes; Deception; Evidence; Experiments; Female; Generalizability Theory; Humans; Influences; Judgment - physiology; Male; Mental Recall - physiology; Mixed Methods Research; Photic Stimulation; Photography; Pictorial Stimuli; Psychological Tests; Qualitative Research; Semantics; Statistical Analysis; Truth Disclosure; Value Judgment
• ISSN: 0278-7393; 1939-1285
• DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000099

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.