People were swayed to believe an associated claim was false due to this effect in which semantically unrelated photos should have interfered with conceptual processing of the claim.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Non-probative photos are photos related to some information without any characteristic of proof functioning as decoration.

non-probative photos

Newman, E. J., & Zhang, L. (2020). Truthiness: How non-probative photos shape belief. In R. Greifeneder, M. Jaffé, E. J. Newman, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), The psychology of fake news: Accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation (pp. 90–114). London: Routledge. 

Truthiness: How non-probative photos shape belief

The effect in which a non-probative photo has an impact on people's beliefs about the truth of an associated claim, despite the fact that the photo provides no diagnostic evidence for the claim's truthfulness.

The Truthiness Effect

- photos are inherently trustworthy
- people's judgments are swayed via a cognitive fluency mechanism, facilitating the semantic processing of a claim
- the inclusion of photos, despite being non-probative, creates an illusion of evidence

Possible reasons why non-probative photos sway people’s judgments:

Falsiness Effect

The exposure to non-probative photos causes people to overestimate how familiar they are with stimuli shown on the photo (Wilson & Westman, 2018) and how much they know about a process in which the stimuli is involved (Cardwell et al., 2017).

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