People may repeatedly encounter the same misinformation when it “goes viral.” The results of four main experiments (two preregistered) and a pilot experiment (total N = 2,587) suggest that repeatedly encountering misinformation makes it seem less unethical to spread—regardless of whether one believes it. Seeing a fake-news headline one or four times reduced how unethical participants thought it was to publish and share that headline when they saw it again—even when it was clearly labeled as false and participants disbelieved it, and even after we statistically accounted for judgments of how likeable and popular it was. In turn, perceiving the headline as less unethical predicted stronger inclinations to express approval of it online. People were also more likely to actually share repeated headlines than to share new headlines in an experimental setting. We speculate that repeating blatant misinformation may reduce the moral condemnation it receives by making it feel intuitively true, and we discuss other potential mechanisms that might explain this effect.
AlterA. L.OppenheimerD. M. (2009). Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Personality and Social Psychological Review, 13, 219–235. doi:10.1177/1088868309341564
4.
BeggI. M.AnasA.FarinacciS. (1992). Dissociation of processes in belief: Source recollection, statement familiarity, and the illusion of truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121, 446–458. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.121.4.446
5.
BullockJ. G.GreenD. P.HaS. E. (2010). Yes, but what’s the mechanism? (Don’t expect an easy answer). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 550–558.
DechêneA.StahlC.HansenJ.WänkeM. (2010). The truth about the truth: A meta-analytic review of the truth effect. Personality and Social Psychological Review, 14, 238–257. doi:10.1177/1088868309352251
8.
DijksterhuisA.SmithP. K. (2002). Affective habituation: Subliminal exposure to extreme stimuli decreases their extremity. Emotion, 2, 203–214. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.2.3.203
9.
EffronD. A. (2018). It could have been true: How counterfactual thoughts reduce condemnation of falsehoods and increase political polarization. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44, 729–745. doi:10.1177/0146167217746152
10.
EffronD. A.MillerD. T. (2012). How the moralization of issues grants social legitimacy to act on one’s attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 690–701. doi:10.1177/0146167211435982
11.
FazioL. K.BrashierN. M.PayneB. K.MarshE. J. (2015). Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 993–1002. doi:10.1037/xge0000098
12.
FrederickS. (2005). Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19, 25–42.
13.
HaidtJ. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814–834.
14.
HasherL.GoldsteinD.ToppinoT. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16, 107–112. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(77)80012-1
15.
JarudiI.KrepsT.BloomP. (2008). Is a refrigerator good or evil? The moral evaluation of everyday objects. Social Justice Research, 21, 457–469.
16.
KwanL. Y.-Y.YapS.ChiuC.-y. (2015). Mere exposure affects perceived descriptive norms: Implications for personal preferences and trust. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 129, 48–58. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2014.12.002
17.
LahamS. M.AlterA. L.GoodwinG. P. (2009). Easy on the mind, easy on the wrongdoer: Discrepantly fluent violations are deemed less morally wrong. Cognition, 112, 462–466.
18.
LazerD. M.BaumM. A.BenklerY.BerinskyA. J.GreenhillK. M.MenczerF.. . . RothschildD. (2018). The science of fake news. Science, 359, 1094–1096.
19.
McGloneM. S.TofighbakhshJ. (2000). Birds of a feather flock conjointly (?): Rhyme as reason in aphorisms. Psychological Science, 11, 424–428.
MoninB.PizarroD. A.BeerJ. S. (2007). Deciding vs. reacting: Conceptions of moral judgment and the reason-affect debate. Review of General Psychology, 11, 99–111.
22.
MuellerA. B.SkitkaL. J. (2018). Liars, damned liars, and zealots: The effect of moral mandates on transgressive advocacy acceptance. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 9, 711–718. doi:10.1177/1948550617720272
NordgrenL. F.DijksterhuisA. (2008). The devil is in the deliberation: Thinking too much reduces preference consistency. Journal of Consumer Research, 36, 39–46.
25.
PeerE.BrandimarteL.SamatS.AcquistiA. (2017). Beyond the Turk: Alternative platforms for crowdsourcing behavioral research. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 153–163.
26.
PennycookG.CannonT. D.RandD. G. (2018). Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147, 1865–1880. doi:10.1037/xge0000465
27.
PennycookG.RandD. G. (2019). Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition, 188, 39–50. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.011
28.
ReberR.SchwarzN. (1999). Effects of perceptual fluency on judgments of truth. Consciousness and Cognition, 8, 338–342.
29.
ReberR.SchwarzN.WinkielmanP. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience?Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 364–382.
30.
ScheufeleD. A.KrauseN. M. (2019). Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 116, 7662–7669. doi:10.1073/pnas.1805871115
31.
SchwarzN. (2004). Metacognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14, 332–348.
32.
ShalviS.DanaJ.HandgraafM. J. J.De DreuC. K. W. (2011). Justified ethicality: Observing desired counter-factuals modifies ethical perceptions and behavior. Organi-zational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 115, 181–190.
33.
ShidlovskiD.SchulY.MayoR. (2014). If I imagine it, then it happened: The implicit truth value of imaginary representations. Cognition, 133, 517–529.
SkitkaL. J.BaumanC. W. (2008). Moral conviction and political engagement. Political Psychology, 29, 29–54.
36.
SkurnikI.YoonC.ParkD. C.SchwarzN. (2005). How warnings about false claims become recommendations. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 713–724.
37.
VosoughiS.RoyD.AralS. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359, 1146–1151.
38.
WeaverK.GarciaS. M.SchwarzN.MillerD. T. (2007). Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: A repetitive voice can sound like a chorus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 821–833.
39.
WhittleseaB. W.JacobyL. L.GirardK. (1990). Illusions of immediate memory: Evidence of an attributional basis for feelings of familiarity and perceptual quality. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 716–732.
40.
ZajoncR. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2, Pt. 2), 1–27. doi:10.1037/h0025848
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
