Replication of Pennycook et al. (2018) at The University of Alabama

We are a group of undergraduate students completing this replication as a project in Dr. Alexa Tullett's Flexa Lab. Original Abstract The 2016 U.S. presidential election brought considerable attention to the phenomenon of “fake news”: entirely fabricated and often partisan content that is presented as factual. Here we demonstrate one mechanism that contributes to the believability of fake news: fluency via prior exposure. 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. 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. 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. It is interesting, however, that we also found that prior exposure does not impact entirely implausible statements (e.g., “The earth is a perfect square”). 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. As a consequence, the scope and impact of repetition on beliefs is greater than has been previously assumed. Replication Objectives In this study, we aim to replicate an existing study, which examined whether repeated exposure to fake news headlines and stories influences participants to have more belief in them. This study also aims to add to the literature on the illusory truth effect. Based on the conclusions of the original study, we hypothesize that a) repetition of extremely implausible fake news stories will not increase the belief that participants have in their truth, b) repetition of plausible false and true news headlines will increase participant belief in their accuracy, and c) warning participants that the headlines they are seeing may be false will decrease perceived accuracy of both true and false headlines.