The illusory certainty: Information repetition and impressions of truth enhance subjective confidence in validity judgments independently of the factual truth [Dataset]

DOI

People not only judge repeatedly perceived information as more likely being true (the so-called truth effect) they also tend to be more confident after judging the validity of repeated information. These phenomena are assumed to be caused by a higher subjective feeling of ease (i.e., fluency) when processing repeated (vs. new) information. Based on the suggestion that a higher number of coherent mental activations is promoting a fluency experience, we argue that besides repetition an already existing information network, that is (nonspecific) prior knowledge, can enhance fluency. Following this argumentation, information repetition as well as the act of judging incoming information as being true (vs. false) should feed into subjective confidence – independently of the factual truth (when judging under uncertainty). To test this, we reanalyzed two published data sets and conducted a new study. In total, participants (N = 247) gave 29,490 truth judgments and corresponding ratings of subjective confidence while attending two judgement phases (i.e., 10 minutes and 1 week after the exposure phase in each experiment). Results showed that (a) repetition (in 3 of 3 data sets) and (b) impressions of truth (in 2 of 3 data sets) were systematically related to higher subjective confidence. Moreover, we found (c) a significant positive interaction between repetition and impressions of truth after both intervals in all data sets. Our analyses further underline the moderating effect of time: Influences of repetition significantly decreased with increasing time interval. Notably, the factual truth did not systematically affect any of the above reported effects.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.11588/data/WDQJWW
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-024-01956-7
Metadata Access https://heidata.uni-heidelberg.de/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.11588/data/WDQJWW
Provenance
Creator Stump, Annika ORCID logo; Voss, Andreas ORCID logo; Rummel, Jan ORCID logo
Publisher heiDATA
Contributor Voss, Andreas
Publication Year 2024
Funding Reference DFG GRK 2277
Rights CC BY 4.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
OpenAccess true
Contact Voss, Andreas (Heidelberg University)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/csv; text/plain
Size 668945; 513
Version 1.1
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences