How Warnings about False Claims Become Recommendations

Telling people that a consumer claim is false can make them misremember it as true. In two experiments, older adults were especially susceptible to this “illusion of truth ” effect. Repeatedly identifying a claim as false helped older adults remem-ber it as false in the short term but paradoxically made them more likely to re-member it as true after a 3 day delay. This unintended effect of repetition comes from increased familiarity with the claim itself but decreased recollection of the claim’s original context. Findings provide insight into susceptibility over time to memory distortions and exploitation via repetition of claims in media and advertising. In everyday life, people are bombarded with consumerinformation, from a wide variety of sources that differ in credibility (such as news reports, advertisements, Web sites, and so on) and in diverse consumption domains (from packaged goods to medical care). A crucial task for people is to determine whether the information they see is true or false. And because people often act on consumer infor-