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Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news
Open accessAbstract
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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
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“Reducing the sharing of misinformation is of substantial importance, because simply being exposed to misinformation can increase subsequent belief13,20–22.”
From Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing the spread of misinformation (2022) · cites this paper as [13]
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“Some explanations for belief in misinformation identify factors that resist intervention (4), while others propose policy approaches that are effective in practice but difficult to scale (34, 44).”
From A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India (2020) · cites this paper as [44]
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“20 Given these findings, it is important to develop approaches for interventions before prior beliefs are set.”
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Misinformation Beyond Traditional Feeds: Evidence from a WhatsApp Deactivation Experiment in Brazil
Ventura, T., Majumdar, R., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. A. (2025) · The Journal of Politics · doi:10.1086/737172 · Cited by 12
Jain, K., & Achuthan, K. (2025) · Frontiers in Computer Science · doi:10.3389/fcomp.2025.1570085 · Cited by 7
Kaufman, R. P., Broukhim, A., & Haupt, M. R. (2025) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3757521 · Cited by 11
“This is a tall order, as different people perceive and act on information in different ways [43, 52, 67, 77].”
InfluentialRuggieri, S. A., Bonfanti, R. C., Santoro, G., Passanisi, A., & Pace, U. (2023) · Cyberpsychology Behavior and Social Networking · doi:10.1089/cyber.2022.0199 · Cited by 7
“Third, to interpret the results linked to the improvement of the general impression of fake news, we should consider what Pennycook and colleagues 54 pointed out: repeated exposure to fake news messages increases individuals’ believes in those themes over time.”
Emotion, Digital Media, and Misinformation
Weeks, B. E. (2023) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1093/oso/9780197520536.003.0022 · Cited by 9
Testing the Effect of Information on Discerning the Veracity of News in Real Time
Aslett, K., Sanderson, Z., Godel, W., Persily, N., Nagler, J., Bonneau, R., & Tucker, J. A. (2023) · Journal of Experimental Political Science · doi:10.1017/xps.2023.20 · Cited by 7
“…in previous studies utilized articles that they themselves selected, regardless of their popularity (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Clayton et al., 2019; Pennycook and Rand, 2020), or they themselves created (Moravec et al., 2018; Pennycook et al., 2018), potentially introducing sampling biases.”
Is Explanation the Cure? Misinformation Mitigation in the Short Term and Long Term
Hsu, Y.-L., Dai, S.-C., Xiong, A., & Ku, L. (2023) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (Findings of EMNLP) · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.92 · Cited by 14
Park, C. S. (2023) · Journalism Studies · doi:10.1080/1461670x.2023.2289878 · Cited by 7
“Fake news is often de fi ned as “ entirely fabricated and often partisan content that is presented as factual ” (Pennycook, Cannon, and Rand 2018, 1865).”
BackgroundNaive skepticism scale: development and validation tests applied to the chilean population
Ferrer‐Urbina, R., Ramírez, Y., Mena‐Chamorro, P., Carmona-Halty, M. A., & Sepúlveda-Páez, G. L. (2024) · Psicologia Reflexão e Crítica · doi:10.1186/s41155-024-00288-0 · Cited by 9
Accuracy prompts protect professional content moderators from the illusory truth effect
Lin, H., Savio, M. T., Huang, X., Steiger, M. E., Guevara, R. L., Szostak, D., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2024) · PNAS Nexus · doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae481 · Cited by 7
“Exposure effects have been found to compound over multiple ex - posures (12), and these effects may cause moderators to become less effective at moderating content over time (at least in terms of accuracy).”
Situational Factors Influencing Receptivity to Bullshit
Brown, M., Keefer, L. A., & McGrew, S. J. (2019) · Social Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.32872/spb.v14i3.37393 · Cited by 8
Predicting hoax spread in Indonesia using SIRS model
Oktaviansyah, E., & Rahman, A. (2020) · Journal of Physics Conference Series · doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1490/1/012059 · Cited by 7
The Magnitude Heuristic: Larger Differences Increase Perceived Causality
Daniels, D. P., & Kupor, D. M. (2022) · Journal of Consumer Research · doi:10.1093/jcr/ucac035 · Cited by 7
Eriksson, J., & Giacomello, G. (2022) · Routledge eBooks · doi:10.4324/9781003110224-8 · Cited by 9
The Half-Truth Effect and Its Implications for Sustainability
Barchetti, A., Neybert, E., Mantel, S. P., & Kardes, F. R. (2022) · Sustainability · doi:10.3390/su14116943 · Cited by 9
Fake News Incidents through the Lens of the DCAM Disinformation Blueprint
Rapti, M., Tsakalidis, G., Petridou, S. G., & Vergidis, K. (2022) · Information · doi:10.3390/info13070306 · Cited by 10
“On an individual level, regular exposure to a particular message affects a user’s perspective, viewpoints, and their behavior in general [79,80].”
BackgroundEpistemic obligations and free speech
Millar, B. (2022) · Analytic Philosophy · doi:10.1111/phib.12279 · Cited by 8
“…instance, Nadarevic and Aßfalg (2017) provided individuals with a description of the truth effect, told them that half of the statements they were about to read were false, and explicitly instructed them not to allow repetition to influence their judgements regarding the 21 Pennycook et al. (2018).”
Metadata
- Authors
- Pennycook, G., Cannon, T. D., & Rand, D. G.
- Affiliations
- Yale University (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Experimental Psychology General
- Published
- 2018-12
- Volume
- 147
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 1865-1880
- ISSN
- 0096-3445 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-2222
- PMC
- PMC6279465
- OpenAlex
- W3125618971
- Cited by
- 1,268
- References
- 58
- Citations by year
- 2026: 117 · 2025: 139 · 2024: 141 · 2023: 204 · 2022: 188 · 2021: 198 · 2020: 180 · 2019: 79 · 2018: 20
- FWCI
- 270.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Journal of Experimental Psychology General (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
- National Institute of Mental Health (MH081902)
- Templeton World Charity Foundation
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Deception detection and forensic psychology
- Keywords
- fake news, illusory truth effect, prior exposure, perceived accuracy, fluency, social media, Facebook, 2016 US presidential election, fact-checking, political ideology, belief formation, repetition
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Female, Humans, Judgment, Deception, Male, Perception, Politics, United States, Social Media
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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