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When Fluency Signals Truth: Prior Successful Reliance on Fluency Moderates the Impact of Fluency on Truth Judgments
Author(s) -
Scholl Sabine G.,
Greifeneder Rainer,
Bless Herbert
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of behavioral decision making
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1099-0771
pISSN - 0894-3257
DOI - 10.1002/bdm.1805
Subject(s) - fluency , psychology , cognitive psychology , processing fluency , repetition (rhetorical device) , metacognition , verbal fluency test , social psychology , cognition , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics education , neuroscience , neuropsychology
Repeated statements are more frequently judged to be true. One position relates this so‐called “truth effect” to metacognitive experiences of fluency, suggesting that repeated statements are more frequently judged to be true because they are processed more fluently. Although most prior research focused on why repetition influences truth judgments, considerably less is known about when fluency is used as information. The present research addresses this question and investigates whether reliance on fluency is moderated by learning experiences. Specifically, we focus on changes in the reliance on fluency over the course of time. A series of experiments reveals that fluency is more likely to be used in truth judgments when previous reliance on fluency has resulted in valid judgments, compared with when previous reliance on fluency was misleading. These findings suggest that reliance on fluency in judgments is a finely tuned process that takes prior experiences with fluency‐based judgments into account. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.