Why is it that we sometimes believe false information without actually knowing the facts especially if it reinforces our own opinions or beliefs? This is known as the Illusory Truth Effect which was first thought of in 1977 by Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino. The Illusory Truth Effect is when people start to believe false information to be true after they hear or see it multiple times. The Illusory Truth Effect is also known by many other names such as the reiteration effect, illusion of truth effect, truth effect, and validity effect. One time or another, whether you knew it or not we all fell victim to the Illusory Truth Effect.
There is a lot of bad that can come out of this effect because people can get you to believe what they want you to believe and spread fake news very fast. I guess some people could use it in a good way but for the most part I think people will use this negatively in order to manipulate others into believing what they want them to think. I think this because I have seen it happen so many times especially when it comes to politics and marketing. An example of the Illusory Truth Effect in marketing that comes to mind is promoting natural and healthy foods. Some companies like to promote that their food with all natural ingredients is healthy but a lot of times they still have hidden chemicals and a lot of sugar. Even though you can read the ingredients and see that they aren’t actually healthy most people do not do that and instead believe what the companies repeatedly promote even if they are wrong.
Since the beginning of social media it had a big influence on the Illusory Truth Effect and how it became more prevalent. All social media companies have political agendas and promote whatever they want in their own self-interest. Just think about how many people use social media multiple times a day and get the majority of their information from it. Anyone can post almost whatever they want on social media no matter if it is true or false and once people start to see the same thing multiple times the Illusory Truth Effect will start to take effect.
The Illusory Truth Effect was very common with COVID-19 especially in the beginning when no one knew actual facts about it yet still spread information about it enough to where people believed them. “A study published in the British Medical Journal has shown that more than 1 in 4 of YouTube videos about the coronavirus contained ‘inaccurate or misleading information’.” (https://www.kub-uk.net/insights/illusory-truth-effect/ ). This was only one form of social media that has evidence of spreading wrong information about this virus so you can only imagine how much false information is out there that the Illusory Truth Effect led people to believe. For something as big and potentially life threatening as COVID-19 the Illusory Truth Effect had a huge negative impact on many people.
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/illusory-truth-effect/
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