Joana Mello

ISPA Instituto Universitário | ISPA · William James Research Center

It is well established that the physical attractiveness of the source of a message can influence recipients' attitudes about the message proposal. The current research is the first to examine if attractiveness is also capable of affecting attitude confidence and resistance to change. Experiment 1 revealed that an attractive source decreased recipie...

Previous research has shown that fluency effects are driven by discrepancies between current and baseline fluency. Thus, illusions of truth associated with repetition (which increases statement fluency and its perceived truth-value relative to new statements) are less likely to occur when participants judge pure lists of either all-repeated or all-...

The statement “what is beautiful is good” reflects a persuasive heuristic that may be supported either by a general association of attractiveness with positivity or by a specific association with the perceived credibility of an attractive source. In one study (N = 58), we approach this question using an explicit and an implicit measure (Stroop Task...

We review research showing that the meaning of physical actions matters, that meaning can vary, and that the key element of meaning to affect judgments is the perceived validity of the thoughts. This article first describes studies on embodied persuasion for which changing the meaning of a behavior also changes the effect of that behavior on attitu...

Neste artigo apresentamos os dados de dois pré-testes do grau de “verdade percebida” de afirmações sobre diferentes tópicos. O objectivo destes pré-testes salienta a necessidade de encontrar afirmações consideradas ambíguas no seu grau de veracidade e a sua relevância para a investigação de enviesamentos de percepção de verdade. As afirmações foram...

Tell me something that sounds familiar and I will believe it to be true. This is a statement that we should believe because it summarizes a well-documented and empirically supported effect: the illusion of truth effect (see Dechêne, Stahl, Hansen, & Wänke, 2010 for a review). The fact is we are more likely to believe a statement if we have been pre...

Two experiments contrast the effects of fluency due to repetition and fluency due to color contrast on judgments of truth, after participants learn to associate high levels of fluency with falseness (i.e., a reversal of the fluency-truth link). Experiment 1 shows that the interpretation of fluency as a sign of truth is harder to reverse when learni...

In this paper, we present norms concerning the perceived association that two sets of stimuli (photos of people and photos of objects) establish with the concept of expertise. Participants were presented with a set of words associated with the expertise dimension and subsequently asked to judge each stimulus on how much it related with the learned...

Individuals judge fluently processed statements truer than disfluent statements, which reflects an illusion of truth. A dual-processing approach to the truth effect suggests that cognitive resources and motivation for accuracy should moderate this effect. However, previous research has only manipulated participants’ capacity during the encoding of...

In this work, we present norms concerning the perceived association of two sets of image stimuli with the concept of “beauty”: 40 objects (Study 1) and 40 photos of human faces (Study 2) . Participants were presented with a set of words associated with the construct of “beauty” and were subsequently asked to judge each image on how much they consid...