Blog Post Eleven: EOTO- The Illusory Truth Effect

     The illusory truth effect shows how, when we repeatedly receive incorrect information, we frequently start to believe it to be true. Unfortunately, this also occurs when people ought to know better, like when individuals initially recognizing the falsity of the misinformation. Repetition can influence how people view the truth. If a claim has been presented to a person before, they are more likely to believe it. This phenomenon sheds light on the effectiveness of propaganda and advertising as well as the reason why people accept false information as fact.

    For example, imagine a cold going around your school, and you want to try your best to avoid getting sick. Multiple people and other sources have told you that taking vitamin C can prevent sickness, so you start to take it regularly. After conducting real research, you come to learn there is no true evidence that the vitamin C is what prevents the cold. Although it could boost your immune system, there is no real proof it is a preventer against a virus. This is when the bias occurs. We all like to assume that we are immune to false information, yet even the most informed people can fall victim to the illusory truth effect. When a bogus claim initially appears on our social media feed, or you hear from a few sources, we could be dubious of it, but the more we are exposed to it, the more we begin to believe it to be true- and our prior awareness cannot stop this. 

    Misinformation can spread like wildfire to enormous numbers of people very quickly in the social media age. The evidence implies that online efforts led by influencers or celebrities who are aware that all it takes to start a rumor is to repeat it consistently, and it will have a significant impact on our generation. Although it sounds dramatic, this poses a challenge to both the fabric of our societies and integrity of democracy itself. Knowing that we evaluate information accuracy in a biased manner is crucial in this day and age. 

    How can we determine whether a claim is accurate or not? Naturally, you would assume, we evaluate that assertion to the available data using our existing knowledge set and perhaps a few strategically placed Google searches. Unfortunately people are not always logical when it comes to things like this. We make an average of 35,000 decisions a day. We cannot possibly hope to analyze everything throughly as we would like with all the decisions we must make and the massive amount of information that is being bombarded upon us every second. We frequently make judgement errors as a result of the numerous heuristics we use to make sense of the world in order to conserve our finite mental resources. The illusory truth effect is caused by a few underlying biases and heuristics. 

    Most of us are all too acquainted with the term "fake news" by this point. Non of us are immune to the false rumors, conspiracies, and blatant lies that thrive on he internet. We will all come across fake news eventually and given the abundance of lies in our media environment, it is likely that we do so frequently. We run the risk of the illusory truth effect just from this. It's vital to be aware of the illusory truth effect and other biases that skew our judgement so that we are encouraged to pause and consider information we may otherwise accept as true with a little more skepticism.