People with easier to pronounce names promote truthiness of claims

Eryn J. Newman, Mevagh Sanson, Emily K. Miller, Adele Quigley-McBride, Jeffrey L. Foster, Daniel M. Bernstein, Maryanne Garry

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    40 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    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 positive dimension, and extended that work by asking subjects to rate those names on negative dimensions. Then we addressed a novel theoretical issue by asking subjects to read that same list of names, and judge the truth of claims attributed to them. Across all experiments, easily pronounced names trumped difficult names. Moreover, the effect of pronounceability produced truthiness for claims attributed to those names. Our findings are a new instantiation of truthiness, and extend research on the truth effect as well as persuasion by showing that subjective, tangential properties such as ease of processing can matter when people evaluate information attributed to a source.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article numbere88671
    Number of pages5
    JournalPLoS One
    Volume9
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2014

    Open Access - Access Right Statement

    Copyright: 2014 Newman et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

    Cite this