Participants were given a true or false quiz in which they had to guess the meaning of words in a foreign language and were then given the correct answer after each item. However, this process was occasionally interrupted by a tone. When this tone occurred, participants were instructed to press a key and then continue with the quiz. Later these participants took the same  true or false quiz but without the correct answers. The words that the participants had been informed were false were more likely to be misremembered as being true later if they had been interrupted by the tone while learning this information.

Interrupted Falsehoods Experiment

Participants were shown videos of people smiling and asked to judge whether the smile was real or fake. After each trial, participants were told whether or not each smile was real or fake. One some trials, participants were simultaneously asked to respond to a tone. During the subsequent test phase, participants were more likely to identify fake smiles as real when the judgement was paired with a secondary interruptive task.

Gilbert Study (1990)

If an individual is distracted or interrupted when they are presented with inaccurate information, they are more likely to misremember that incorrect information as being true.

Pepperdine University

University of California, Davis

- interrupted falsehoods
- illusory truth effect
- Tip-of-the-tongue state
- fact checking
-	source monitoring
-	cognitive shortcuts/ properties of the knowledge base

Terms and Concepts Related to False Beliefs

Marsh, E. J., & Stanley, M. (2020). False beliefs: Byproducts of an adaptive knowledge base? In R. Greifeneder, M. Jaffé, E. J. Newman, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), The psychology of fake news: Accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation (pp. 131–146). London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429295379

False beliefs: Byproducts of an adaptive knowledge base?

People often more readily believe information that they hear repeated than they believe novel information.

Illusory Truth Effect

Interrupted Falsehoods

A frustrating state of being in which one is having difficulty recalling information that is just out of reach.

Tip-Of-The-Tongue State (TOT State)

The Moses illusion is a semantic illusion in which listeners or readers fail to recognize an obvious inaccuracy in a text or question. For example, when asked, "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?" people frequently answer "two," failing to notice the false premise that it was Noah, not Moses, who took animals on the ark.

The Moses Illusion

The process by which a message, when paired with a discounting cue, has a delayed impact on the recipient. For example, if an individual sees the same advertisement on television every day, it begins to lose its initial appeal causing the individual to revert to his/her original attitude about the advertised product.

Sleeper Effect


The failure to engage in reflective, effortful reasoning when encountering new information.

Relying too heavily on our existing heuristic patterns without modifying them.

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