Truth from familiar turns of phrase: Word and number collocations in the corpus of language influence acceptance of novel claims

People are more likely to accept a claim as true, the more often they heard it in the past. We test whether using frequently encountered formal characteristics in constructing a novel claim increases its acceptance as true. A corpus analysis (study 1) established that, in everyday language use, lower-bound modifiers (e.g., “more than”) collocate more frequently with large numbers than upper-bound modifiers (e.g., “less than”). This regularity...