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"Unkelbach, Christian"
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The Learned Interpretation of Cognitive Fluency
The fluency of cognitive processes influences many judgments: Fluently processed statements are judged to be true, fluently processed instances are judged to be frequent, and fluently processed names are judged to be famous. According to a cue-learning approach, these effects of experienced fluency arise because the fluency cue is interpreted differentially in accordance with its learned validity. Two experiments tested this account by manipulating the fluency cue's validity. Fluency was manipulated by color contrast (Experiment 1) and by required mental rotation (Experiment 2). If low fluency was correlated with a required affirmative or \"old\" response (and high fluency with a negative or \"new\" response) in a training phase, participants showed a reversal of the classic pattern in the recognition phase: Low-fluency stimuli had a higher probability than high-fluency stimuli to be classified as old. Thus, the interpretation and therefore the impact of fluency depended on the cue's learned validity.
Journal Article
Truth by Repetition
People believe repeated information more than novel information; they show a repetition-induced truth effect. In a world of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and strategic information management, understanding this effect is highly important. We first review explanations of the effect based on frequency, recognition, familiarity, and coherent references. On the basis of the latter explanation, we discuss the relations of these explanations. We then discuss implications of truth by repetition for the maintenance of false beliefs and ways to change potentially harmful false beliefs (e.g., “Vaccination causes autism”), illustrating that the truth-by-repetition phenomenon not only is of theoretical interest but also has immediate practical relevance.
Journal Article
A Cognitive-Ecological Explanation of Intergroup Biases
People often hold negative attitudes toward out-groups and minority groups. We argue that such intergroup biases may result from an interaction of basic cognitive processes and the structure of the information ecology. This cognitive-ecological model assumes that groups such as minorities and out-groups are often novel to a perceiver. At the level of cognition, novel groups are primarily associated with their unique attributes, that is, attributes that differentiate them from other groups. In the information ecology, however, unique attributes are likely to be negative. Thus, novel groups, and by proxy minorities and out-groups, tend to be associated with negative attributes, leading to an evaluative disadvantage. We demonstrated this disadvantage in three experiments in which participants successively formed impressions about two fictional groups associated with the same number of positive and negative attributes. Participants preferred the first group over the novel group as long as the groups’ unique attributes were negative.
Journal Article
The Epistemic Status of Processing Fluency as Source for Judgments of Truth
This article combines findings from cognitive psychology on the role of processing fluency in truth judgments with epistemological theory on justification of belief. We first review evidence that repeated exposure to a statement increases the subjective ease with which that statement is processed. This increased processing fluency, in turn, increases the probability that the statement is judged to be true. The basic question discussed here is whether the use of processing fluency as a cue to truth is epistemically justified. In the present analysis, based on Bayes’ Theorem, we adopt the reliable-process account of justification presented by Goldman (
1986
) and show that fluency is a reliable cue to truth, under the assumption that the majority of statements one has been exposed to are true. In the final section, we broaden the scope of this analysis and discuss how processing fluency as a potentially universal cue to judged truth may contribute to cultural differences in commonsense beliefs.
Journal Article
The Experience of Thinking
When retrieving a quote from memory, evaluating a testimony's truthfulness, or deciding which products to buy, people experience immediate feelings of ease or difficulty, of fluency or disfluency. Such \"experiences of thinking\" occur with every cognitive process, including perceiving, processing, storing, and retrieving information, and they have been the defining element of a vibrant field of scientific inquiry during the last four decades.
This book brings together the latest research on how such experiences of thinking influence cognition and behavior. The chapters present recent theoretical developments and describe the effects of these influences, as well as the practical implications of this research. The book includes contributions from the leading scholars in the field and provides a comprehensive survey of this expanding area. This integrative overview will be invaluable to researchers, teachers, students, and professionals in the field of social and cognitive psychology.
eBook
Serial-Position Effects in Evaluative Judgments
Serial evaluations are the basis of many judgment and decision processes (e.g., in sports, talent shows, or academic examinations). We address the advantages and disadvantages of being in the beginning or the end of such evaluation series. We propose that for serial evaluations, people must calibrate a transformation function that translates observable stimulus input (e.g., performances) into available judgment categories (e.g., \"pass\" or \"fail\"). Until this function is calibrated, people are motivated to avoid extreme categories. Therefore, being good in the beginning is disadvantageous because one is more likely to be categorized as \"average\" than \"good,\" whereas being bad is advantageous because one is more likely to be categorized \"average\" than \"bad.\" We present real-life and laboratory examples of the proposed calibration effects and compare the calibration explanation with other accounts of serial-position effects. Based on these theoretical considerations, we suggest possible ways to avoid these position effects in serial evaluations.
Journal Article
Monetary incentives do not reduce the repetition-induced truth effect
People rate and judge repeated information more true than novel information. This truth-by-repetition effect is of relevance for explaining belief in fake news, conspiracy theories, or misinformation effects. To ascertain whether increased motivation could reduce this effect, we tested the influence of monetary incentives on participants’ truth judgments. We used a standard truth paradigm, consisting of a presentation and judgment phase with factually true and false information, and incentivized every truth judgment. Monetary incentives may influence truth judgments in two ways. First, participants may rely more on relevant knowledge, leading to better discrimination between true and false statements. Second, participants may rely less on repetition, leading to a lower bias to respond “true.” We tested these predictions in a preregistered and high-powered experiment. However, incentives did not influence the percentage of “true” judgments or correct responses in general, despite participants’ longer response times in the incentivized conditions and evidence for knowledge about the statements. Our findings show that even monetary consequences do not protect against the truth-by-repetition effect, further substantiating its robustness and relevance and highlighting its potential hazardous effects when used in purposeful misinformation.
Journal Article
Robustness Tests Replicate Corneille et al.’s (2020) Fake News by Repetition Effect
Corneille et al. (2020) found that repetition increases judgments that statements have been used as fake news on social media. They also found that repetition increases truth judgments and decreases falsehood judgments (i.e., two instantiations of the truth-by-repetition effect). These results supported an ecological explation of the truth-by-repetition effect better than two altertive accounts. However, the first author of the present article found unsuspected programming issues in Corneille et al.’s experiments. These programming issues introduced confounds that may have been responsible for the results. To estimate whether Corneille et al.’s main findings and claims hold when correcting these issues, the current team agreed on two high-powered preregistered replications of Corneille et al.’s experiments (Ntotal = 540). The results replicate Corneille et al.’s findings, which are more consistent with an ecological account of repetition effects on judgment than the altertive accounts tested in the origil publication.
Journal Article
Moses, money, and multiple-choice: The Moses illusion in a multiple-choice format with high incentives
When people answer the question “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?”, they usually respond with “two,” although Moses does not appear in the biblical story of the Ark. We investigated this “Moses illusion” in a multiple-choice format and tested the influence of monetary incentives on the illusion’s strength. Thereby, we addressed the role of a cooperative communication context for the illusion’s emergence, as well as the role of participants’ motivation. In four experiments (total N = 914), we found that the Moses illusion persists in a multiple-choice format. As the multiple-choice format realizes a cooperative context in which the correct answer is always available, we exclude a cooperative context explanation for the illusion. Monetary incentives reduced the strength of the illusion. However, the reduction was numerically and statistically small. We thereby show that the illusion is not due to violations of cooperative communications, and not due to a lack of motivation. The multiple-choice approach will facilitate further research on the Moses illusion and the data provide additional evidence for the Moses illusion’s empirical robustness and constrain its theoretical explanations.
Journal Article