Illusions of knowledge due to mere repetition

Repeating information increases people's belief that the repeated information is true. This truth effect has been widely researched and is relevant for topics such as fake news and misinformation. Another effect of repetition, which is also relevant to those topics, has not been extensively studied so far: Do people believe they knew something before it was repeated? We used a standard truth effect paradigm in four pre-registered experiments (total N = 773), including a presentation and judgment phase. However, instead of "true"/"false" judgments, participants indicated whether they knew a given trivia statement before participating in the experiment. Across all experiments, participants judged repeated information as "known" more often than novel information. Participants even judged repeated false information to know it to be false. In addition, participants also generated sources of their knowledge. The inability to distinguish recent information from well-established knowledge in memory adds an explanation for the persistence and strength of repetition effects on truth. The truth effect might be so robust because people believe to know the repeatedly presented information as a matter of fact.