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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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Svahn, M., & Perfumi, S. C. (2022) · JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government · doi:10.29379/jedem.v14i2.746 · Cited by 2
“The echo-chamber-like structure of the networks within social media platforms [17, 36], and the personalization process carried out by algorithms, can reinforce existing biases within the users [37], who tend to be exposed mostly to information that supports their pre-existing beliefs.”
BackgroundWeighting ratings: Are people adjusting for bias in extreme reviews?
Ocean, N. (2023) · Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied · doi:10.1037/xap0000497 · Cited by 3
Trust in media and processing of health information during the Covid-19 pandemic
Park, C. S. (2024) · Health & New Media Research · doi:10.22720/hnmr.2024.00045 · Cited by 2
“The proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories on social media platforms during the pandemic likely exacerbated cognitive load and uncertainty, prompting individuals to prioritize efficiency over accuracy when evaluating information from these sources (Pennycook et al., 2020).”
BackgroundCorbitt, K., Hiltbrand, K. A., Coursen, M. M., Rodning, S. P. P., Smith, W. B., & Mulvaney, D. R. (2024) · Education Sciences · doi:10.3390/educsci14080852 · Cited by 2
Fake Tweets Detection and Its Impacts on the 2020 U.S. Election Prediction
Qorib, M., & Kim, J. (2024) · International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC) · doi:10.1109/isncc62547.2024.10758954 · Cited by 2
Online-Informationen: Nutzung und Produktion
Schweiger, W. (2025) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-3-658-18017-1_40-1 · Cited by 2
Bell, R., Nadarevic, L., Mieth, L., & Buchner, A. (2025) · Cognitive Research Principles and Implications · doi:10.1186/s41235-025-00628-3 · Cited by 3
“Furthermore, warnings such as “disputed by 3rd party fact checkers” do not fully eliminate the illusory-truth effect (Pennycook et al., 2018; see also Nadarevic & Aßfalg, 2017).”
InfluentialWellons, B. M., & Wahlheim, C. N. (2025) · Cognitive Research Principles and Implications · doi:10.1186/s41235-025-00649-y · Cited by 2
“…and the perceived veracity of misinformation are associated in this way is supported by studies showing that repetition increases the perceived veracity of information regardless of its actual veracity or plausibility (e.g., Fazio et al., 2019; Hasher et al., 1977; Pennycook et al., 2018).”
Wahlheim, C. N., Kemp, P. L., Wiley, R. W., & Engelhardt, A. (2025) · Memory & Cognition · doi:10.3758/s13421-025-01760-7 · Cited by 3
Georgiou, N., Pellizzer, M. L., Balzan, R. P., & Wade, T. D. (2025) · International Journal of Eating Disorders · doi:10.1002/eat.24552 · Cited by 2
“…online material (Pennycook and Rand 2019), (b) interpretation , or how they make sense of the material (e.g., what the content means to them; Pennycook et al. 2018; Lewandowsky et al. 2017), and (c) belief updating , or how exposure to misinformation changes the way a person views…”
Cognitive Drivers of Misinformation Belief and Sharing on Social Media: A Cross-National Comparison
Chan, M., Vaccari, C., & Yamamoto, M. (2025) · Mass Communication & Society · doi:10.1080/15205436.2025.2577294 · Cited by 4
“As Pennycook et al. (2018) noted, analytical individuals are more likely to judge the veracity of new information based on its degree of plausibility, and false news often contains elements that tend toward the implausible, such as the claim in one of our posts that “monkeypox can live on door…”
Baltezarević, R., Lović, V., & Baltezarević, I. (2025) · International Journal of Cognitive Research in Science Engineering and Education · doi:10.23947/2334-8496-2025-13-3-823-835 · Cited by 4
Comparative Study of TF-IDF and Word Embedding in the Classification of Hoax Political News
Dayani, A. D., Satria, C., Rebecca, V. C., Anggrawan, A., Sugijanto, P. W., & Hasbullah, H. (2025) · International Conference on Cybernetics and Intelligent System (ICORIS) · doi:10.1109/icoris67789.2025.11295994 · Cited by 2
“A study conducted by [5] confirmed that the more often someone receives information, the greater the possibility of accepting the information as being of dubious truth.”
ERP correlates of semantic inconsistencies in deepfakes
Monahhova, E., Morozova, A. N., Bredikhin, D., Gorodnicheva, J., Bekim, A., Shestakova, A. N., & Klucharev, V. A. (2026) · NeuroImage · doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2026.121727 · Cited by 2
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.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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