Truthiness, the illusory truth effect, and the role of need for cognition

Ease of processing—cognitive fluency—is a central input in assessments of truth, but little is known about individual differences in susceptibility to fluency-based biases in truth assessment. Focusing on two paradigms—truthiness and the illusory truth effect—we consider the role of Need for Cognition (NFC), an individual difference variable capturing one’s preference for elaborative thought. Across five experiments, we replicated basic...