Eryn J. Newman

Australian National University | ANU · Research School of Psychology

Does repeated exposure to climate-skeptic claims influence their acceptance as true, even among climate science endorsers? Research with general knowledge claims shows that repeated exposure to a claim increases its perceived truth when it is encountered again. However, motivated cognition research suggests that people primarily endorse what they a...

We organize image types by their substantive relationship with textual claims and discuss their impact on attention, comprehension, memory, and judgment. Photos do not need to be false (altered or generated) to mislead; real photos can create a slanted representation or be repurposed from different events. Even semantically related non-probative ph...

Remote appearances for courtroom proceedings have become common practice in recent years. When a court participant appears remotely, they introduce new and often tangential cues as part of their video background. We have seen varying (and at times, controversial) background cues across virtual court members, with scholars and legal professionals no...

The Transfer-appropriate Processing (TAP) framework has demonstrated enhanced recognition memory when processing operations engaged at encoding and at test match. Our research applied TAP to study the illusory truth effect (ITE). We investigated whether the match/mismatch of evaluative goals at encoding and at test affects the ITE. At encoding, par...

When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent-truthiness. This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a diverse sample u...

Objectives: Recent virtual court proceedings have seen a range of technological challenges, producing not only trial interruptions but also cognitive interruptions in processing evidence. Very little empirical research has focused on how the subjective experience of processing evidence affects evaluations of trial participants and trial decisions....

In everyday language, abstract concepts are described in terms of concrete physical experiences (e.g., good things are “up”; the past is “behind” us). Stimuli congruent with such conceptual metaphors are processed faster than stimuli that are not. Since ease of processing enhances aesthetic pleasure, stimuli should be perceived as more pleasing whe...

General Audience Summary People are more likely to believe a statement when they have seen or heard it before, a phenomenon called the illusory truth effect. This has important implications for daily life, where we are repeatedly exposed to both true and false information as we scroll through social media, read the news, or talk with others. We tes...

This open-access book examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign. Thanks to funding from the Swiss National Science Foundat...

Claims are more likely to be judged true when presented with a related nonprobative photo (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). According to a processing fluency account, related photos facilitate processing and easy processing fosters acceptance of the claim. Alternatively, according to an illusion-of-evidence account, related phot...

True or false? “A woodpecker is the only bird that can fly backwards.” When such a claim appears with a related, but non-probative photo (e.g., a photo of a woodpecker perched on a tree) people are more likely to think the claim is true—a truthiness effect. This truthiness effect holds across a range of judgments, including judgments about general...

Drawing on research on subjective confidence, we examined how the confidence and speed in responding to personality items track the consistency and variability in the response to the same items over repeated administrations. Participants (N = 57) responded to 132 personality items with a true/false response format. The items were presented five tim...

Non‐probative but related photos can increase the perceived truth value of statements relative to when no photo is presented (truthiness ). In 2 experiments, we tested whether truthiness generalizes to credibility judgements in a forensic context. Participants read short vignettes in which a witness viewed an offence. The vignettes were presented w...

Ease of processing-cognitive fluency-is a central input in assessments of truth, but little is known about individual differences in susceptibility to fluency-based biases in truth assessment. Focusing on two paradigms-truthiness and the illusory truth effect-we consider the role of Need for Cognition (NFC), an individual difference variable captur...

We normed one hundred trivia claims, each with a true and false version, by proportion of people who judged them to be true. Twenty claims were chosen for each of the following five categories: Science, geography, sports, animals, and food. This paper outlines the method of claim creation and includes all claims and truth rating data. Data was coll...

Increasingly, scientific communications are recorded and made available online. While researchers carefully draft the words they use, the quality of the recording is at the mercy of technical staff. Does it make a difference? We presented identical conference talks (Experiment 1) and radio interviews from NPR’s Science Friday (Experiment 2) in high...

Can the mere name of a seller determine his trustworthiness in the eye of the consumer? In 10 studies (total N = 608) we explored username complexity and trustworthiness of eBay seller profiles. Name complexity was manipulated through variations in username pronounceability and length. These dimensions had strong, independent effects on trustworthi...

People can mentally travel to the future to "prelive" events they might experience. This ability to mentally prelive future events is closely related to the ability to mentally relive past events. People report traveling back in time to relive experiences that happened in their past in order to direct their behavior in the present, so people may im...

Research shows that when semantic context makes it feel easier for people to bring related thoughts and images to mind, people can misinterpret that feeling of ease as evidence that information is positive. But research also shows that semantic context does more than help people bring known concepts to mind—it also teaches people new concepts. In f...

Reviews research into intuitions of truth and discusses its implications for fake news, social media, and the correction of misinformation. -- The published version (open access) is here: http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2017/08/gut-truth.aspx

Photos lead people to believe that both true and false events have happened to them, even when those photos provide no evidence that the events occurred. Research has shown that these nonprobative photos increase false beliefs when combined with misleading suggestions and repeated exposure to the photo or target event. We propose that photos exert...

When people rapidly judge the truth of claims about the present or the past, a related but nonprobative photo can produce “truthiness,” an increase in the perceived truth of those claims (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). What we do not know is the extent to which nonprobative photos cause truthiness for the future. We addressed...

** Note: This post includes the text accepted for publication, which was subsequently highly copy-edited to fit the magazine format of the journal. ** Erroneous beliefs are difficult to correct. Worse, popular correction strategies may backfire and further increase the spread and acceptance of misinformation. People evaluate the truth of a stateme...

Forensic scientists have come under increasing pressure to quantify the strength of their evidence, but it is not clear which of several possible formats for presenting quantitative conclusions will be easiest for lay people, such as jurors, to understand. This experiment examined the way that people recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (n = 541...

When people rapidly judge the truth of claims presented with or without related but nonprobative photos, the photos tend to inflate the subjective truth of those claims-a "truthiness" effect (Newman et al., 2012). For example, people more often judged the claim "Macadamia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches" to be true when the clai...

When people make judgments about the truth of a claim, related but nonprobative information rapidly leads them to believe the claim-an effect called "truthiness" [1]. Would the pronounceability of others' names also influence the truthiness of claims attributed to them? We replicated previous work by asking subjects to evaluate people's names on a...

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...

The persuasive power of brain images has captivated scholars in many disciplines. Like others, we too were intrigued by the finding that a brain image makes accompanying information more credible (McCabe & Castel in Cognition 107:343-352, 2008). But when our attempts to build on this effect failed, we instead ran a series of systematic replications...

When people evaluate claims, they often rely on what comedian Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness," or subjective feelings of truth. In four experiments, we examined the impact of nonprobative information on truthiness. In Experiments 1A and 1B, people saw familiar and unfamiliar celebrity names and, for each, quickly responded "true" or "false" to t...

Of all the higher mental processes, memory ranks up there as one of the most crucial. It helps us do rudimentary tasks such as turning on the toaster in the morning, grinding our coffee and meeting a friend at the right time. But it also helps us do more sophisticated things too: like solving complex problems, feeling love, reminiscing with family...

On the first day of April of 2012, an interesting trial took place in Wells County, exactly 103 years after the famous trial described by Wigmore (1909). The defendant, D, was charged with brutally stabbing a homeless man just after midnight on New Year’s Day. Before the police arrived on the crime scene, the perpetrator, rushing to flee the scene,...

When people take drugs such as propranolol in response to trauma, it may dampen their bad memories – tempering recall of a traumatic event. We examined people's attitudes toward these drugs. Americans and New Zealanders read about a hypothetical assault inserting themselves into a scenario as a victim attacked while serving on a peace keeping missi...

Recollecting the past is often accompanied by a sense of veracity—a subjective feeling that we are reencountering fragments of an episode as it occurred. Yet years of research suggest that we can be surprisingly inaccurate in what we recall. People can make relatively minor memory errors such as misremembering attributes of past selves and misremem...