Prior Exposure Increases Perceived Accuracy of Fake News

By Gordon Pennycook, Tyrone D. Cannon, David G. Rand. 2018

1,070 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election brought considerable attention to the phenomenon of “fake news”: entirely fabricated and often partisan content that is presented as factual. Here we demonstrate one mechanism that contributes to the believability of fake news: fluency via prior exposure. Using actual fake-news headlines presented as they were seen on Facebook, we show that even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy, both within the same session and after a week. Moreover, this “illusory truth effect” for fake-news headlines occurs despite a low level of overall believability and even when the stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers or are inconsistent with the reader’s political ideology. These results suggest that social media platforms help to incubate belief in blatantly false news stories and that tagging such stories as disputed is not an effective solution to this problem. It is interesting, however, that we also found that prior exposure does not impact entirely implausible statements (e.g., “The earth is a perfect square”). These observations indicate that although extreme implausibility is a boundary condition of the illusory truth effect, only a small degree of potential plausibility is sufficient for repetition to increase perceived accuracy. As a consequence, the scope and impact of repetition on beliefs is greater than has been previously assumed.

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society (2023, background): “From impersonation spurring spamming to disinformation campaigns, the spread of misinformation online can be perpetuated by reinforcement and volume; people are more likely to believe false information when they see it more than once, for example if it has been shared by multiple people in their net”
Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Fake News: How Social Media Conditions Individuals to Be Less Critical of Political Misinformation (2021, background): “…the cognitive processes of individuals; the more one hears a story, the more familiar it becomes and the likelihood that it will be accepted increases with the frequency of repetition (Hasher et al., 1977; Schwarz et al., 2007) – even if it is completely fabricated story (Pennycook et al., 2018).”
Identity concerns drive belief: The impact of partisan identity on the belief and dissemination of true and false news (2018, background): “This is a problem because familiarity with (fake) news increases perceptions of accuracy (Pennycook et al., 2018).”
Moderating with the Mob: Evaluating the Efficacy of Real-Time Crowdsourced Fact-Checking (2021, background): “In addition, prior exposure to false stories increases one’s belief in its veracity, and so individuals may be especially inaccurate when evaluating the most viral stories that have garnered significant exposure online (Fazio et al. 2015; Pennycook, Cannon, and Rand 2018; Wittenberg et al. 2020).”
The Debunking Handbook 2020 (2020, neutral): “Even if a source is identified as unreliable or is blatantly false and inconsistent with people’s ideology, repeated exposure to information still tilts people towards believing its claims 10, 11, 12, 13 .”