Given the ease with which fake news can be created and distributed on social media platforms ( Shane, 2017), combined with our increasing tendency to consume news via social media ( Gottfried & Shearer, 2016), it is likely that we are being exposed to fake news stories with much greater frequency than in the past. Here, we explore one potential answer: prior exposure. How is it that so many people came to believe stories that were patently and demonstrably untrue? What mechanisms underlie these false beliefs that might be called mass delusions? Although it is unclear to what extent fake news influenced the outcome of the Presidential Election ( Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017), there is no question that many people were deceived by entirely fabricated (and often quite fanciful) fake news stories – including, for example, high-ranking government officials, such as Pakistan’s defense minister ( Goldman, 2016). An analysis of the top performing news articles on Facebook in the months leading up to the election revealed that the top fake news articles actually outperformed the top real news articles in terms of shares, likes, and comments ( Silverman, Strapagiel, Shaban, & Hall, 2016). This is most notably exemplified by so-called “fake news” – that is, news stories that were fabricated (but presented as if from legitimate sources) and promoted on social media in order to deceive the public for ideological and/or financial gain ( Lazer et al., 2018). The potential for systematic inaccuracy in important beliefs has been particularly highlighted by the wide-spread consumption of disinformation during the 2016 US Presidential Election. Yet the ability to form and update beliefs about the world sometimes goes awry – and not just in the context of inconsequential, small-stakes decisions. Across a wide range of domains, it is critically important to correctly assess what is true and what is false: Accordingly, differentiating real from unreal is at the heart of our societal constructs of rationality and sanity ( Corlett, 2009 Sanford, Veckenstedt, & Moritz, 2014). The ability to form accurate beliefs, particularly about issues of great importance, is key to our success as individuals as well as the functioning of our societal institutions (and, in particular, democracy). As a consequence, the scope and impact of repetition on beliefs is greater than previously assumed. These observations indicate that although extreme implausibility is a boundary condition of the illusory truth effect, only a small degree of potential plausibility is sufficient for repetition to increase perceived accuracy. Interestingly, however, we also find that prior exposure does not impact entirely implausible statements (e.g., “The Earth is a perfect square”). These results suggest that social media platforms help to incubate belief in blatantly false news stories, and that tagging such stories as disputed is not an effective solution to this problem. Moreover, this “illusory truth effect” for fake news headlines occurs despite a low level of overall believability, and even when the stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers or are inconsistent with the reader’s political ideology. Using actual fake news headlines presented as they were seen on Facebook, we show that even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy, both within the same session and after a week. Here we demonstrate one mechanism that contributes to the believability of fake news: fluency via prior exposure. The 2016 US Presidential Election brought considerable attention to the phenomenon of “fake news”: entirely fabricated and often partisan content that is presented as factual.
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