People with easier to pronounce names promote truthiness of claims

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 9; no. 2; p. e88671
• Main Authors: Newman, Eryn J, Sanson, Mevagh, Miller, Emily K, Quigley-McBride, Adele, Foster, Jeffrey L, Bernstein, Daniel M, Garry, Maryanne
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 26.02.2014; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Celebrities; Cognition & reasoning; Experimental psychology; Experiments; Humans; Judgments; Metacognition; Names; Personality; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Social psychology; Truth Disclosure
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0088671

When people make judgments about the truth of a claim, related but nonprobative information rapidly leads them to believe the claim--an effect called "truthiness". Would the pronounceability of others' names also influence the truthiness of claims attributed to them? We replicated previous work by asking subjects to evaluate people's names on a positive dimension, and extended that work by asking subjects to rate those names on negative dimensions. Then we addressed a novel theoretical issue by asking subjects to read that same list of names, and judge the truth of claims attributed to them. Across all experiments, easily pronounced names trumped difficult names. Moreover, the effect of pronounceability produced truthiness for claims attributed to those names. Our findings are a new instantiation of truthiness, and extend research on the truth effect as well as persuasion by showing that subjective, tangential properties such as ease of processing can matter when people evaluate information attributed to a source.