The effect of nonprobative photographs on truthiness persists over time

When making rapid judgments about the truth of a claim, related nonprobative information leads people to believe the claim-an effect called "truthiness" (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). For instance, within a matter of seconds, subjects judge the claim "The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows," to be true more often when it appears with a photograph of the Mona Lisa viewed at a distance by a person. But does truthiness persist longer than a few seconds? To determine if truthiness "sticks," we asked people to judge if each trivia claim in a series was true. Half of the claims appeared with nonprobative photos; the rest appeared alone. In a second session 48h later, people returned and made the same judgments about the same statements, but this time, all claims appeared without photos. We found that truthiness "stuck." The magnitude of the effect of photos on subjective feelings of truth was consistent over time. These results fit with those from cognitive and educational psychology, as well as with the related idea that photos make relevant information more available and familiar-and therefore feel more true-even after a delay.