Syracuse University

Study Design: Subjects were shown 6 of 12 headlines 4 times during a familiarization phase. Then, during a judgement phase, they were shown a mixture of previously seen and new headlines. They had to rate the headlines in a variety of criteria, including how unethical it would be to share the headlines, how likely they were to engage in social media behaviors like "liking", sharing, or posting negative comments, accuracy beliefs, and reading comprehension. 

Results: The moral condemnation results supported the study’s hypothesis that people will rate headlines they have seen earlier as less unethical to publish as compared to those they had not seen previously. The intended social-media behaviors results showed people were significantly more likely to share or “like” a previously seen headline and were less likely to block or unfollow the person who posted the previously seen headline as opposed to new headlines. Additionally, the study’s findings argued that accuracy beliefs had no significant effects on the results of the participants’ moral judgements.

Misinformation and Morality Experiment 1: Prior Exposure and Ethicality Ratings

Effron, D. A., &amp; Raj, M. (2019). Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share. Psychological Science, 31(1), 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619887896 

Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share

Misinformation and Morality Further Results for Experiment 1

There are a few different mechanisms that could explain why people thought repeatedly-seen headlines were less unethical to share. 

Fluency: Even though participants were told the information was false, recognizing the headline could have made it feel more intuitively true. This could explain the weaker moral condemnation in the intuitive thinking group in experiment 3. 

The fluency-truth association can make the blatantly false information easier to digest. 
Alternatively, we have weaker reactions to stimuli as they occur repeatedly. This could be happening with the headlines. Both would explain why seeing a headline once led to less of a moral condemnation reduction than seeing the headline 4 times. 

It is important to note that the reduction in moral condemnation is not a result of the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect does not apply to clearly false information, and the subjects were clearly told the headlines were fake, except for experiment 4. The participants needed to pass a comprehension check that ensured they knew the article was fake, so they could not be basing their judgments on thinking the article was true.


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