Judging fast and slow: The truth effect does not increase under time-pressure conditions

Abstract

Due to the information overload in today’s digital age, people may sometimes feel pressured to process and judge information especially fast. In three experiments, we examined whether time pressure increases the repetition-based truth effect — the tendency to judge repeatedly encountered statements more likely as “true” than novel statements. Based on the Heuristic-Systematic Model, a dual-process model in the field of persuasion research, we expected that time pressure would boost the truth effect by increasing reliance on processing fluency as a presumably heuristic cue for truth, and by decreasing knowledge retrieval as a presumably slow and systematic process that determines truth judgments. However, contrary to our expectation, time pressure did not moderate the truth effect. Importantly, this was the case for difficult statements, for which most people lack prior knowledge, as well as for easy statements, for which most people hold relevant knowledge. Overall, the findings clearly speak against the conception of fast, fluency-based truth judgments versus slow, knowledge-based truth judgments. In contrast, the results are compatible with a referential theory of the truth effect that does not distinguish between different types of truth judgments. Instead, it assumes that truth judgments rely on the coherence of localized networks in people’s semantic memory, formed by both repetition and prior knowledge.