Summary: | Due to the
information overload in today’s digital age, people may sometimes feel
pressured to process and judge information especially fast. In three
experiments, we examined whether time pressure increases the repetition-based
truth effect --- the tendency to judge repeatedly encountered statements more
likely as “true” than novel statements. Based on the Heuristic-Systematic
Model, a dual-process model in the field of persuasion research, we expected
that time pressure would boost the truth effect by increasing reliance on
processing fluency as a presumably heuristic cue for truth, and by decreasing
knowledge retrieval as a presumably slow and systematic process that determines
truth judgments. However, contrary to our expectation, time pressure did not
moderate the truth effect. Importantly, this was the case for difficult
statements, for which most people lack prior knowledge, as well as for easy
statements, for which most people hold relevant knowledge. Overall, the
findings clearly speak against the conception of fast, fluency-based truth
judgments versus slow, knowledge-based truth judgments. In contrast, the
results are compatible with a referential theory of the truth effect that does
not distinguish between different types of truth judgments. Instead, it assumes
that truth judgments rely on the coherence of localized networks in people’s
semantic memory, formed by both repetition and prior knowledge.
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