Misinformed by images: How images influence perceptions of truth and what can be done about it.

We organize image types by their substantive relationship with textual claims and discuss their impact on attention, comprehension, memory, and judgment. Photos do not need to be false (altered or generated) to mislead; real photos can create a slanted representation or be repurposed from different events. Even semantically related non-probative photos, merely inserted to attract eyeballs, can increase message acceptance through increased fluency. Messages with images receive more attention and reach a wider audience. Text-congruent images can scaffold the comprehension of true and false claims and support the formation of correct and false memories. Standard laboratory procedures may underestimate the impact of images in natural media contexts: by drawing all participants' attention to a message that may be ignored without an image, they inflate message effects in the control condition. Misleading images are difficult to identify and their influence often remains outside of awareness, making it hard to curb their influence through critical-thinking interventions. Current concerns about deep fakes may reduce trust in all images, potentially limiting their power to mislead as well as inform. More research is needed to understand how knowing that an image is misleading influences inferences, impressions, and judgments beyond immediate assessments of the image's credibility.

Repetition effects in memory and truth assessments through the lens of transfer-appropriate processing.

The Transfer-appropriate Processing (TAP) framework has demonstrated enhanced recognition memory when processing operations engaged at encoding and at test match. Our research applied TAP to study the illusory truth effect (ITE). We investigated whether the match/mismatch of evaluative goals at encoding and at test affects the ITE. At encoding, participants saw target words (Experiments 1-3; or full trivia claims Experiments 4-5) and completed an evaluative goal: imagery task or vowel-counting. At test, participants saw target words embedded in trivia claims that were old or new and completed the same (matching) or different (mismatching) evaluative goal that they completed at encoding, before making truth or memory ratings. We found a typical TAP effect for memory judgements when people saw words at encoding, but no TAP effect when people saw claims at encoding. We also found an ITE when people saw claims at encoding, but no ITE when people saw words at encoding (no evidence of TAP moderating truth judgments). Together these results extend both the TAP and ITE literatures, suggesting boundary conditions for TAP and the conditions under which the ITE emerges.

An ongoing secondary task can reduce the illusory truth effect.

Introduction: People are more likely to believe repeated information-this is known as the Illusory Truth Effect (ITE). Recent research on the ITE has shown that semantic processing of statements plays a key role. In our day to day experience, we are often multi-tasking which can impact our ongoing processing of information around us. In three experiments, we investigate how asking participants to engage in an ongoing secondary task in the ITE paradigm influences the magnitude of the effect of repetition on belief. Methods: Using an adapted ITE paradigm, we embedded a secondary task into each trial of the encoding and/or test phase (e.g., having participants count the number of vowels in a target word of each trivia claim) and calculated the overall accuracy on the task. Results: We found that the overall ITE was larger when participants had no ongoing secondary task during the experiment. Further, we predicted and found that higher accuracy on the secondary task was associated with a larger ITE. Discussion: These findings provide initial evidence that engaging in an ongoing secondary task may reduce the impact of repetition. Our findings suggest that exploring the impact of secondary tasks on the ITE is a fruitful area for further research.

Stable truthiness effect across the lifespan.

When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent-truthiness. This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a diverse sample using materials appropriate for all ages. We tested participants (N = 414; Age range = 3-87 years) in two culturally diverse environments: a community science center (First language: English (61.4%); Mandarin/Cantonese (11.6%); Spanish (6%), other (21%); ethnicity: unreported) and a psychology lab (First language: English (64.4%); Punjabi (9.8%); Mandarin/Cantonese (7.4%); other (18.4%); ethnicity: Caucasian (38%); South Asian (30.7%); Asian (22.7%); other/unreported (8.6%). Participants rated trivia claims as true or false. Half the claims appeared with a semantically related photo, and half appeared without a photo. Results showed that participants of all ages more often rated claims as true when claims appeared with a photo; however, this truthiness effect was stable across the lifespan. If truthiness age differences exist, they are likely negligible in the general population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Sound and credibility in the virtual court: Low audio quality leads to less favorable evaluations of witnesses and lower weighting of evidence.

OBJECTIVES: Recent virtual court proceedings have seen a range of technological challenges, producing not only trial interruptions but also cognitive interruptions in processing evidence. Very little empirical research has focused on how the subjective experience of processing evidence affects evaluations of trial participants and trial decisions. Metacognitive research shows that the subjective ease or difficulty of processing information can affect evaluations of people, belief in information, and how a given piece of information is weighted in decision making. HYPOTHESES: We hypothesized that when people experienced technological challenges (e.g., poor audio quality) while listening to eyewitness accounts, the difficulty in processing evidence would lead them to evaluate a witness more negatively, influence their memory for key facts, and lead them to weigh that evidence less in final trial judgments. METHOD: Across three experiments (total N = 593), participants listened to audio clips of witnesses describing an event, one presented in high-quality audio and one presented in low-quality audio. RESULTS: When people heard witnesses present evidence in low-quality audio, they rated the witnesses as less credible, reliable, and trustworthy (Experiment 1, d = 0.32; Experiment 3, d = 0.55); had poorer memory for key facts presented by the witness (Experiment 2, d = 0.44); and weighted witness evidence less in final guilt judgments (Experiment 3, ηp² = .05). CONCLUSION: These results show that audio quality influences perceptions of witnesses and their evidence. Because these variables can contribute to trial outcomes, audio quality warrants consideration in trial proceedings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Truthiness, the illusory truth effect, and the role of need for cognition.

Ease of processing-cognitive fluency-is a central input in assessments of truth, but little is known about individual differences in susceptibility to fluency-based biases in truth assessment. Focusing on two paradigms-truthiness and the illusory truth effect-we consider the role of Need for Cognition (NFC), an individual difference variable capturing one's preference for elaborative thought. Across five experiments, we replicated basic truthiness and illusory truth effects. We found very little evidence that NFC moderates truthiness. However, we found some evidence that (without an experimental warning), people high on NFC may be more susceptible to the illusory truth effect. This may reflect that elaborative thought increases the fluency with which encoded statements are processed after a delay (thus increasing the illusory truth effect). Future research may fruitfully test whether the influence of NFC and other individual difference measures depends on whether people are making immediate or delayed truth judgments.

Evidence that photos promote rosiness for claims about the future.

When people rapidly judge the truth of claims about the present or the past, a related but nonprobative photo can produce "truthiness," an increase in the perceived truth of those claims (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). What we do not know is the extent to which nonprobative photos cause truthiness for the future. We addressed this issue in four experiments. In each experiment, people judged the truth of claims that the price of certain commodities (such as manganese) would increase (or decrease). Half of the time, subjects saw a photo of the commodity paired with the claim. Experiments 1A and 1B produced a "rosiness" bias: Photos led people to believe positive claims about the future but had very little effect on people's belief in negative claims. In Experiment 2, rosiness occurred for both close and distant future claims. In Experiments 3A and 3B, we tested whether rosiness was tied to the perceived positivity of a claim. Finally, in Experiments 4A and 4B, we tested the rosiness hypothesis and found that rosiness was unique to claims about the future: When people made the same judgments about the past, photos produced the usual truthiness pattern for both positive and negative claims. Considered all together, our data fit with the idea that photos may operate as hypothesis-confirming evidence for people's tendency to anticipate rosy future outcomes.

Photos that increase feelings of learning promote positive evaluations.

Research shows that when semantic context makes it feel easier for people to bring related thoughts and images to mind, people can misinterpret that feeling of ease as evidence that information is positive. But research also shows that semantic context does more than help people bring known concepts to mind-it also teaches people new concepts. In five experiments, we show that when photos increase these feelings of learning, they also increase positive evaluations. People saw fictitious wine names and evaluated claims about each. Within subjects, wine names appeared with (or without) photos depicting the noun in the names. We found that photos promoted positive evaluations, did so most when they were most likely to help people learn new words, and even led people to think the wines tasted better. Together, these findings fit with the idea that semantic context promotes positive evaluations in part by teaching people new concepts. (PsycINFO Database Record

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

Photos lead people to believe that both true and false events have happened to them, even when those photos provide no evidence that the events occurred. Research has shown that these nonprobative photos increase false beliefs when combined with misleading suggestions and repeated exposure to the photo or target event. We propose that photos exert similar effects without those factors, and test that proposition in five experiments. In Experiment 1, people saw the names of several animals and pretended to give food to or take food from each. Then people saw the animal names again, half with a photo of the animal and half alone, and decided whether they had an experience with each. The photos led people to believe they had experiences with the animals. Moreover, Experiments 2-5 provided evidence that photos exerted these effects by making it easier to bring related thoughts and images to mind-a feeling that people mistook as evidence of genuine experience. In each experiment, photos led people to believe positive claims about the past (but not negative claims), consistent with evidence that feelings of ease selectively increase positive judgments. Experiment 4 also showed that photos (like other manipulations of ease) bias people's judgments broadly, producing false beliefs about other people's pasts. Finally, in Experiment 5, photos exerted more powerful effects when they depicted unfamiliar animals, and thus could most help bring information to mind. These findings suggest that nonprobative photos can distort the past without other factors that encourage false beliefs, and that they operate by helping related thoughts and images come to mind.

Lay understanding of forensic statistics: Evaluation of random match probabilities, likelihood ratios, and verbal equivalents.

Forensic scientists have come under increasing pressure to quantify the strength of their evidence, but it is not clear which of several possible formats for presenting quantitative conclusions will be easiest for lay people, such as jurors, to understand. This experiment examined the way that people recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (n = 541) responded to 2 types of forensic evidence--a DNA comparison and a shoeprint comparison--when an expert explained the strength of this evidence 3 different ways: using random match probabilities (RMPs), likelihood ratios (LRs), or verbal equivalents of likelihood ratios (VEs). We found that verdicts were sensitive to the strength of DNA evidence regardless of how the expert explained it, but verdicts were sensitive to the strength of shoeprint evidence only when the expert used RMPs. The weight given to DNA evidence was consistent with the predictions of a Bayesian network model that incorporated the perceived risk of a false match from 3 causes (coincidence, a laboratory error, and a frame-up), but shoeprint evidence was undervalued relative to the same Bayesian model. Fallacious interpretations of the expert's testimony (consistent with the source probability error and the defense attorney's fallacy) were common and were associated with the weight given to the evidence and verdicts. The findings indicate that perceptions of forensic science evidence are shaped by prior beliefs and expectations as well as expert testimony and consequently that the best way to characterize and explain forensic evidence may vary across forensic disciplines.

Truthiness and falsiness of trivia claims depend on judgmental contexts.

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.

People with easier to pronounce names promote truthiness of claims.

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.

The effect of nonprobative photographs on truthiness persists over time.

When making rapid judgments about the truth of a claim, related nonprobative information leads people to believe the claim-an effect called "truthiness" (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). For instance, within a matter of seconds, subjects judge the claim "The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows," to be true more often when it appears with a photograph of the Mona Lisa viewed at a distance by a person. But does truthiness persist longer than a few seconds? To determine if truthiness "sticks," we asked people to judge if each trivia claim in a series was true. Half of the claims appeared with nonprobative photos; the rest appeared alone. In a second session 48h later, people returned and made the same judgments about the same statements, but this time, all claims appeared without photos. We found that truthiness "stuck." The magnitude of the effect of photos on subjective feelings of truth was consistent over time. These results fit with those from cognitive and educational psychology, as well as with the related idea that photos make relevant information more available and familiar-and therefore feel more true-even after a delay.

On the (non) persuasive power of a brain image.

The persuasive power of brain images has captivated scholars in many disciplines. Like others, we too were intrigued by the finding that a brain image makes accompanying information more credible (McCabe & Castel in Cognition 107:343-352, 2008). But when our attempts to build on this effect failed, we instead ran a series of systematic replications of the original study-comprising 10 experiments and nearly 2,000 subjects. When we combined the original data with ours in a meta-analysis, we arrived at a more precise estimate of the effect, determining that a brain image exerted little to no influence. The persistent meme of the influential brain image should be viewed with a critical eye.

Nonprobative photographs (or words) inflate truthiness.

When people evaluate claims, they often rely on what comedian Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness," or subjective feelings of truth. In four experiments, we examined the impact of nonprobative information on truthiness. In Experiments 1A and 1B, people saw familiar and unfamiliar celebrity names and, for each, quickly responded "true" or "false" to the (between-subjects) claim "This famous person is alive" or "This famous person is dead." Within subjects, some of the names appeared with a photo of the celebrity engaged in his or her profession, whereas other names appeared alone. For unfamiliar celebrity names, photos increased the likelihood that the subjects would judge the claim to be true. Moreover, the same photos inflated the subjective truth of both the "alive" and "dead" claims, suggesting that photos did not produce an "alive bias" but rather a "truth bias." Experiment 2 showed that photos and verbal information similarly inflated truthiness, suggesting that the effect is not peculiar to photographs per se. Experiment 3 demonstrated that nonprobative photos can also enhance the truthiness of general knowledge claims (e.g., Giraffes are the only mammals that cannot jump). These effects add to a growing literature on how nonprobative information can inflate subjective feelings of truth.