The study is about how the repetition of wrong statements to an individual turns into illusory truth which then tramps any prior knowledge that an individual had about a particular situation. The study used forty undergraduate students as participants. The method used in the study was an experiment where a 2 by 2 subject design was employed to find comparison between knowledge, repetition and new knowledge.
Introduction
The study was conducted to find out if repetition in spreading of false statements has a chance of creating illusory truth within customers who already have knowledge about a product. Notably, people sometimes have false knowledge concerning products. False knowledge about products usually occur as a result of constant reinforcement resulting from continuous exposure to these false statements. The main aim of the research was to conduct testing on the knowledge-conditional model against the fluency-conditional model to find out how people process truths and knowledge.
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Method
The research employed a 2 by 2 testing procedure. The researchers conducted two experiments to test whether individuals use memory to process truths about certain statements (knowledge-conditional model). They also wanted to know if people used fluency of the statements as a result of constant interaction with content under question (fluency-conditional model. The two models were therefore the two variables and comparisons were made between them.
Results
The part I did not understand was where the authors note that the study analysed truth ratings as a function of individual knowledge against norm based performance. The two terms had not been discussed in detail prior in the document.
Discussion
One major finding is that individuals are more likely to be affected by illusory truth if particular statements are repeated to them. The study also finds that illusory truth has an effect on individuals even when he individuals already had prior knowledge of a subject matter under question. The findings supported the author’s predictions and the author interpreted that illusory truth has a bigger effect on individuals than earlier thought. The main strength of the study is that it tested two models and compared them against one another to get a better grasp of the subject matter. Conclusively, an additional strength is that the study used primary research to corroborate the findings made by other studies previously done.
