Promoting the need for truthful information to foster a democracy built on trust.
Repeated factual statements are considered truer than one-time statements. This truth effect can have direct implications in erroneous beliefs in our media environment, where the repeated acquisition of the same piece of information is likely (news channels; website (re)visits; social networks). In this paper, we discuss the mechanisms underlying the truth effect through a review of the main results. The dominant current explanation of the effect of repetition on the judgment of truth is the familiarity/fluency hypothesis and the possible role of recollection has been underestimated in light of available results. We propose that a correspondence account, according to which both target recollection and familiarity mediate the effect, would better account for the results and suggest further studies to better understand this phenomenon.
