Research shows that the repetition of claims enhances their perceived truth, viz. the illusory truth effect. Although cognitive moderators of this effect have been examined extensively, less attention has been placed on social-identity processes. To address this gap, across two experiments we presented American participants with a single set of country-referencing claims, randomized to be repeated or novel, and American-relevant (e.g., “The US…”) or American-irrelevant (another country). Results showed that both repetition and identity-relevance caused claims to be judged as more true.

Misinformation research has primarily focused on social media posts, headlines, and articles, largely ignoring peer-to-peer transmission. In this study, participants (n = 120 per wave; total N = 600) viewed and wrote summaries of four news articles (conditions: control, misinformation, weak correction, strong correction). These summaries were then presented to four subsequent waves of participants, who in turn wrote their own summaries to be passed on. These summaries were coded for the presence of misinformation and correction details, and misinformation reliance, enabling us to examine how misinformation is transmitted between individuals, and whether misinformation reliance can reemerge after being corrected.

Despite growing concerns over misinformation generated by artificial intelligence (AI), it is not yet known how much people are impacted by such misinformation or how effective interventions are at reducing its impact. In two experiments (N > 1000), a biased AI-generated article influenced people’s reasoning, regardless of its alleged source (human or AI). A pre-emptive, source-based inoculation intervention reduced trust in AI-generated information but did not reduce specific misinformation reliance, whereas a retroactive, content-focused debunking intervention reduced the effect of misinformation on reasoning. Only a combination of inoculation and debunking eliminated the influence of misinformation.

Previous research demonstrates that corrections may not only reduce belief in misinformation, but also impact source credibility. However, it remains to be seen whether corrections differentially impact sources perceived as more credible (e.g., doctors and in-group politicians) vs. less credible (e.g., out-group politicians). Participants were exposed to four false claims about cancer attributed to a doctor, in-group political source, or out-group political source and rated their belief in each claim and the credibility of the source. Half of participants then saw corrections and half read a control text, and then all participants re-rated both belief and source credibility. We found that high credibility sources were believed more at pretest and that corrections reduced belief equally regardless of source credibility. However, corrections reduced source credibility slightly more for high credibility sources, suggesting that corrections may have a larger impact for sources that are trusted more to begin with.

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