Investigating stable qualitative individual differences in the Truth Effect

Details

Supervisors

Corneille, Olivier ; Bena, Jérémy

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

The truth effect is a phenomenon in which individuals judge previously encountered information to be truer than new information. While most participants show a positive truth effect (i.e. they judge repeated statements to be more true than new ones), a minority show individual qualitative differences: they classify repeated information as equally true (“null truth effect”) or even less true than new information (“negative truth effect”). Using a repeated measures design with two sessions separated by one week, our results show a consistent direction only for the positive truth effect score (i.e. the typical truth effect) and do not support the hypothesis of general stability in all directions. These results suggest that stable individual differences in truth effect may be less robust than previously thought, highlighting a potential random aspect in truth judgments at the individual level. We invite researchers to replicate the study, adjusting the sample size to better substantiate the findings regarding potential “negative verifiers”.