Misinformed by images: How images influence perceptions of truth and what can be done about it.

We organize image types by their substantive relationship with textual claims and discuss their impact on attention, comprehension, memory, and judgment. Photos do not need to be false (altered or generated) to mislead; real photos can create a slanted representation or be repurposed from different events. Even semantically related non-probative photos, merely inserted to attract eyeballs, can increase message acceptance through increased fluency. Messages with images receive more attention and reach a wider audience. Text-congruent images can scaffold the comprehension of true and false claims and support the formation of correct and false memories. Standard laboratory procedures may underestimate the impact of images in natural media contexts: by drawing all participants' attention to a message that may be ignored without an image, they inflate message effects in the control condition. Misleading images are difficult to identify and their influence often remains outside of awareness, making it hard to curb their influence through critical-thinking interventions. Current concerns about deep fakes may reduce trust in all images, potentially limiting their power to mislead as well as inform. More research is needed to understand how knowing that an image is misleading influences inferences, impressions, and judgments beyond immediate assessments of the image's credibility.

Understanding Australian Government Risk Communication Early in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Sociodemographics, Risk Attitudes and Media Consumption.

Effective risk communication is essential for government and health authorities to effectively manage public health during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Understanding the factors that influence people's perceptions of crisis-related risk messages is critical to identify gaps and inequalities in population risk communication. Using a longitudinal survey of a representative adult sample, we examined risk communication about COVID-19 during April-June 2020 in Australia across sociodemographic groups especially the at-risk groups, accounting for and exploring the effects of risk attitudes and media engagement. Our findings showed that individuals who were younger, more left-wing, more risk-tolerant, and had a current or a history of mental disorders perceived risk communication of the Australian Government to be lower quality. On the other hand, greater consumption of information from televisions was found to be associated with more positive attitudes toward government risk communication. Our results also revealed the importance of effective and high-quality risk communication in gaining the public endorsement of various public health directions. We discuss the implications of results in terms of the development of effective public communications that lead to health-protective behaviors and effectively scaffold public understanding of risk.

Can degrading information about patient symptoms in vignettes alter clinical reasoning in paramedics and paramedic students? An experimental application of fuzzy trace theory.

BACKGROUND: Research has shown paramedics form rapid intuitive impressions on first, meeting a patient and these impressions subsequently affected their clinical reasoning. We report an experiment where theory-based interventions are developed with the goal of reducing reliance on intuitive reasoning by paramedics and paramedic students in simulated patients. METHOD: Australian paramedics (n = 213; 49% female) and paramedicine students (n = 83; 55% female) attending paramedic conferences completed a 2 × 2 fully between participants experiment. They saw a written clinical vignette designed to be representative of Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) in which key clinical information was precise or degraded (stimulus), they then either chose the single most likely diagnosis from a list, or ranked competing diagnoses (response). Outcome variables were diagnostic rate and response time. RESULTS: There were no differences in the proportion of participants choosing ACS across the four stimulus-response conditions (0.75 [0.65, 0.84] vs 0.79 [0.68, 0.87] vs, 0.78 [0.65, 0.87] vs 0.72 [0.59, 0.82], p = 0.42) CONCLUSION: This is the first study attempting to experimentally examine clinical reasoning in paramedics using a theory-based intervention. Neither of the interventions tested succeeded in altering measures of clinical reasoning. Similar to previous research on physicians, paramedic reasoning appears robust to manipulation.

The Factors Associated With Telehealth Use and Avoidance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Survey.

BACKGROUND: Social distancing requirements due to the COVID-19 pandemic saw a rapid increase in the delivery of telehealth consultations as an alternative to face-to-face health care services. OBJECTIVE: The aims of this study were to assess the use and acceptability of telehealth during the early stages of the pandemic and identify factors associated with telehealth avoidance during this period. METHODS: Data were obtained from waves 4 and 7 of a longitudinal survey designed to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health and behavior of a representative sample of Australian adults. Participants reported on their use or avoidance of telehealth during the assessment period, as well as the mode of telehealth used and acceptability. RESULTS: Approximately 30% of participants reported using telehealth during the assessment periods, with the most common telehealth modality being the telephone. Acceptance of telehealth was generally high and was higher among those who used telehealth compared with those who did not. Approximately 18% of participants reported avoiding health care due to telehealth. Across assessment waves, avoidance was associated with younger age, speaking a language other than or in addition to English, having a current medical diagnosis, and lower levels of telehealth acceptability. CONCLUSIONS: While most participants in this study were accepting of telehealth services, there remain barriers to use, especially among those from particular sociodemographic groups. At a population level, avoidance of health services in nearly one in five adults may have considerable long-term impacts on morbidity and potentially mortality. Targeted efforts to promote engagement with telehealth services are critical if these adverse outcomes are to be avoided, particularly during periods when access to face-to-face services may be limited.

Repetition effects in memory and truth assessments through the lens of transfer-appropriate processing.

The Transfer-appropriate Processing (TAP) framework has demonstrated enhanced recognition memory when processing operations engaged at encoding and at test match. Our research applied TAP to study the illusory truth effect (ITE). We investigated whether the match/mismatch of evaluative goals at encoding and at test affects the ITE. At encoding, participants saw target words (Experiments 1-3; or full trivia claims Experiments 4-5) and completed an evaluative goal: imagery task or vowel-counting. At test, participants saw target words embedded in trivia claims that were old or new and completed the same (matching) or different (mismatching) evaluative goal that they completed at encoding, before making truth or memory ratings. We found a typical TAP effect for memory judgements when people saw words at encoding, but no TAP effect when people saw claims at encoding. We also found an ITE when people saw claims at encoding, but no ITE when people saw words at encoding (no evidence of TAP moderating truth judgments). Together these results extend both the TAP and ITE literatures, suggesting boundary conditions for TAP and the conditions under which the ITE emerges.

An ongoing secondary task can reduce the illusory truth effect.

Introduction: People are more likely to believe repeated information-this is known as the Illusory Truth Effect (ITE). Recent research on the ITE has shown that semantic processing of statements plays a key role. In our day to day experience, we are often multi-tasking which can impact our ongoing processing of information around us. In three experiments, we investigate how asking participants to engage in an ongoing secondary task in the ITE paradigm influences the magnitude of the effect of repetition on belief. Methods: Using an adapted ITE paradigm, we embedded a secondary task into each trial of the encoding and/or test phase (e.g., having participants count the number of vowels in a target word of each trivia claim) and calculated the overall accuracy on the task. Results: We found that the overall ITE was larger when participants had no ongoing secondary task during the experiment. Further, we predicted and found that higher accuracy on the secondary task was associated with a larger ITE. Discussion: These findings provide initial evidence that engaging in an ongoing secondary task may reduce the impact of repetition. Our findings suggest that exploring the impact of secondary tasks on the ITE is a fruitful area for further research.

Smokers Increasingly Motivated and Able to Quit as Smoking Prevalence Falls: Umbrella and Systematic Review of Evidence Relevant to the "Hardening Hypothesis," Considering Transcendence of Manufactured Doubt.

INTRODUCTION: The "hardening hypothesis" proposes that as the prevalence of smoking in a population declines, there will be a "hardening" of the remaining smoker population. This review examines the evidence regarding smokers' motivation, dependence, and quitting behavior as smoking prevalence declines, to assess whether population "hardening" (decreasing propensity to quit) or "softening" (the converse) is occurring. METHODS: MEDLINE, PsychINFO, Scopus, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library were searched to July 2019, using terms related to smoking and hardening, for reviews and large, population-based repeat cross-sectional studies. There were additional searches of reference lists and citations of key research articles. Two reviewers screened half the titles and abstracts each, and two reviewers screened full texts independently using tested criteria. Four reviewers independently and systematically extracted data from eligible publications, with one reviewer per study, checked by another reviewer. RESULTS: Of 265 titles identified, three reviews and ten repeat cross-sectional studies were included. Reviews concluded that hardening has not occurred among the general smoking population over time. Among repeated cross-sectional studies, five examined motivation, nine examined dependence, five examined hardcore smoking, and two examined quit outcomes. All but one study found a lack of hardening. Most found softening within the smoking population, consistent across hardening indicators, definitions, countries (and tobacco control environments), and time periods examined. CONCLUSIONS: Tobacco control reduces smoking prevalence and fosters a smoking population more amenable to evidence-based interventions. Based on the weight of the available evidence, the "hardening hypothesis" should be rejected and the reality of softening accepted. IMPLICATIONS: This umbrella review and systematic review provides a critical consideration of evidence from epidemiology and psychology and other fields regarding the "hardening hypothesis"-a persistent myth undermining tobacco control. It reaches the conclusion that the sum-total of the worldwide evidence indicates either "softening" of the smoking population, or a lack of hardening. Hence, tobacco control reduces smoking prevalence and fosters a smoking population more amenable to evidence-based interventions. The review indicates that the time has come to take active steps to combat the myth of hardening and to replace it with the reality of "softening."

Stable truthiness effect across the lifespan.

When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent-truthiness. This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a diverse sample using materials appropriate for all ages. We tested participants (N = 414; Age range = 3-87 years) in two culturally diverse environments: a community science center (First language: English (61.4%); Mandarin/Cantonese (11.6%); Spanish (6%), other (21%); ethnicity: unreported) and a psychology lab (First language: English (64.4%); Punjabi (9.8%); Mandarin/Cantonese (7.4%); other (18.4%); ethnicity: Caucasian (38%); South Asian (30.7%); Asian (22.7%); other/unreported (8.6%). Participants rated trivia claims as true or false. Half the claims appeared with a semantically related photo, and half appeared without a photo. Results showed that participants of all ages more often rated claims as true when claims appeared with a photo; however, this truthiness effect was stable across the lifespan. If truthiness age differences exist, they are likely negligible in the general population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Sound and credibility in the virtual court: Low audio quality leads to less favorable evaluations of witnesses and lower weighting of evidence.

OBJECTIVES: Recent virtual court proceedings have seen a range of technological challenges, producing not only trial interruptions but also cognitive interruptions in processing evidence. Very little empirical research has focused on how the subjective experience of processing evidence affects evaluations of trial participants and trial decisions. Metacognitive research shows that the subjective ease or difficulty of processing information can affect evaluations of people, belief in information, and how a given piece of information is weighted in decision making. HYPOTHESES: We hypothesized that when people experienced technological challenges (e.g., poor audio quality) while listening to eyewitness accounts, the difficulty in processing evidence would lead them to evaluate a witness more negatively, influence their memory for key facts, and lead them to weigh that evidence less in final trial judgments. METHOD: Across three experiments (total N = 593), participants listened to audio clips of witnesses describing an event, one presented in high-quality audio and one presented in low-quality audio. RESULTS: When people heard witnesses present evidence in low-quality audio, they rated the witnesses as less credible, reliable, and trustworthy (Experiment 1, d = 0.32; Experiment 3, d = 0.55); had poorer memory for key facts presented by the witness (Experiment 2, d = 0.44); and weighted witness evidence less in final guilt judgments (Experiment 3, ηp² = .05). CONCLUSION: These results show that audio quality influences perceptions of witnesses and their evidence. Because these variables can contribute to trial outcomes, audio quality warrants consideration in trial proceedings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Effect of COVID-19 on Mental Health and Wellbeing in a Representative Sample of Australian Adults.

There is minimal knowledge about the impact of large-scale epidemics on community mental health, particularly during the acute phase. This gap in knowledge means we are critically ill-equipped to support communities as they face the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to provide data urgently needed to inform government policy and resource allocation now and in other future crises. The study was the first to survey a representative sample from the Australian population at the early acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Depression, anxiety, and psychological wellbeing were measured with well-validated scales (PHQ-9, GAD-7, WHO-5). Using linear regression, we tested for associations between mental health and exposure to COVID-19, impacts of COVID-19 on work and social functioning, and socio-demographic factors. Depression and anxiety symptoms were substantively elevated relative to usual population data, including for individuals with no existing mental health diagnosis. Exposure to COVID-19 had minimal association with mental health outcomes. Recent exposure to the Australian bushfires was also unrelated to depression and anxiety, although bushfire smoke exposure correlated with reduced psychological wellbeing. In contrast, pandemic-induced impairments in work and social functioning were strongly associated with elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, as well as decreased psychological wellbeing. Financial distress due to the pandemic, rather than job loss per se, was also a key correlate of poorer mental health. These findings suggest that minimizing disruption to work and social functioning, and increasing access to mental health services in the community, are important policy goals to minimize pandemic-related impacts on mental health and wellbeing. Innovative and creative strategies are needed to meet these community needs while continuing to enact vital public health strategies to control the spread of COVID-19.

Subjective Confidence in the Response to Personality Questions: Some Insight Into the Construction of People's Responses to Test Items.

Drawing on research on subjective confidence, we examined how the confidence and speed in responding to personality items track the consistency and variability in the response to the same items over repeated administrations. Participants (N = 57) responded to 132 personality items with a true/false response format. The items were presented five times over the course of two sessions. Consistent with the Self-Consistency Model, the confidence and speed with which an item was endorsed at its first presentation predicted the likelihood of repeating that response across the subsequent presentations of the item, thus tracking test-retest reliability. Confidence and speed also predicted the likelihood that others will make the same response, thus tracking inter-person consensus. However, confidence and speed varied more strongly with within-person consistency than with inter-person consensus, suggesting some reliance on idiosyncratic cues in response formation. These results mirror, in part, findings obtained in other domains such as general knowledge, social attitudes, and personal preferences, suggesting some similarity in the decision processes underlying the response to binary items: responses to personality items are not retrieved ready-made from memory but constructed at the time of testing, based on the sampling of a small number of cues from a larger population of cues associated with the item's content. Because confidence is based on the consistency with which the cues support a response, it is prognostic of within-person consistency and cross-person consensus. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

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 truthiness and illusory truth effects. We found very little evidence that NFC moderates truthiness. However, we found some evidence that (without an experimental warning), people high on NFC may be more susceptible to the illusory truth effect. This may reflect that elaborative thought increases the fluency with which encoded statements are processed after a delay (thus increasing the illusory truth effect). Future research may fruitfully test whether the influence of NFC and other individual difference measures depends on whether people are making immediate or delayed truth judgments.

Corrigendum: The Effect of COVID-19 on Mental Health and Wellbeing in a Representative Sample of Australian Adults.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.579985.].

Evidence that photos promote rosiness for claims about the future.

When people rapidly judge the truth of claims about the present or the past, a related but nonprobative photo can produce "truthiness," an increase in the perceived truth of those claims (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). What we do not know is the extent to which nonprobative photos cause truthiness for the future. We addressed this issue in four experiments. In each experiment, people judged the truth of claims that the price of certain commodities (such as manganese) would increase (or decrease). Half of the time, subjects saw a photo of the commodity paired with the claim. Experiments 1A and 1B produced a "rosiness" bias: Photos led people to believe positive claims about the future but had very little effect on people's belief in negative claims. In Experiment 2, rosiness occurred for both close and distant future claims. In Experiments 3A and 3B, we tested whether rosiness was tied to the perceived positivity of a claim. Finally, in Experiments 4A and 4B, we tested the rosiness hypothesis and found that rosiness was unique to claims about the future: When people made the same judgments about the past, photos produced the usual truthiness pattern for both positive and negative claims. Considered all together, our data fit with the idea that photos may operate as hypothesis-confirming evidence for people's tendency to anticipate rosy future outcomes.

Photos that increase feelings of learning promote positive evaluations.

Research shows that when semantic context makes it feel easier for people to bring related thoughts and images to mind, people can misinterpret that feeling of ease as evidence that information is positive. But research also shows that semantic context does more than help people bring known concepts to mind-it also teaches people new concepts. In five experiments, we show that when photos increase these feelings of learning, they also increase positive evaluations. People saw fictitious wine names and evaluated claims about each. Within subjects, wine names appeared with (or without) photos depicting the noun in the names. We found that photos promoted positive evaluations, did so most when they were most likely to help people learn new words, and even led people to think the wines tasted better. Together, these findings fit with the idea that semantic context promotes positive evaluations in part by teaching people new concepts. (PsycINFO Database Record

Make It Short and Easy: Username Complexity Determines Trustworthiness Above and Beyond Objective Reputation.

Can the mere name of a seller determine his trustworthiness in the eye of the consumer? In 10 studies (total N = 608) we explored username complexity and trustworthiness of eBay seller profiles. Name complexity was manipulated through variations in username pronounceability and length. These dimensions had strong, independent effects on trustworthiness, with sellers with easy-to-pronounce or short usernames being rated as more trustworthy than sellers with difficult-to-pronounce or long usernames, respectively. Both effects were repeatedly found even when objective information about seller reputation was available. We hypothesized the effect of name complexity on trustworthiness to be based on the experience of high vs. low processing fluency, with little awareness of the underlying process. Supporting this, participants could not correct for the impact of username complexity when explicitly asked to do so. Three alternative explanations based on attributions of the variations in name complexity to seller origin (ingroup vs. outgroup), username generation method (seller personal choice vs. computer algorithm) and age of the eBay profiles (10 years vs. 1 year) were tested and ruled out. Finally, we show that manipulating the ease of reading product descriptions instead of the sellers' names also impacts the trust ascribed to the sellers.

Nonprobative photos rapidly lead people to believe claims about their own (and other people's) pasts.

Photos lead people to believe that both true and false events have happened to them, even when those photos provide no evidence that the events occurred. Research has shown that these nonprobative photos increase false beliefs when combined with misleading suggestions and repeated exposure to the photo or target event. We propose that photos exert similar effects without those factors, and test that proposition in five experiments. In Experiment 1, people saw the names of several animals and pretended to give food to or take food from each. Then people saw the animal names again, half with a photo of the animal and half alone, and decided whether they had an experience with each. The photos led people to believe they had experiences with the animals. Moreover, Experiments 2-5 provided evidence that photos exerted these effects by making it easier to bring related thoughts and images to mind-a feeling that people mistook as evidence of genuine experience. In each experiment, photos led people to believe positive claims about the past (but not negative claims), consistent with evidence that feelings of ease selectively increase positive judgments. Experiment 4 also showed that photos (like other manipulations of ease) bias people's judgments broadly, producing false beliefs about other people's pasts. Finally, in Experiment 5, photos exerted more powerful effects when they depicted unfamiliar animals, and thus could most help bring information to mind. These findings suggest that nonprobative photos can distort the past without other factors that encourage false beliefs, and that they operate by helping related thoughts and images come to mind.

Lay understanding of forensic statistics: Evaluation of random match probabilities, likelihood ratios, and verbal equivalents.

Forensic scientists have come under increasing pressure to quantify the strength of their evidence, but it is not clear which of several possible formats for presenting quantitative conclusions will be easiest for lay people, such as jurors, to understand. This experiment examined the way that people recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (n = 541) responded to 2 types of forensic evidence--a DNA comparison and a shoeprint comparison--when an expert explained the strength of this evidence 3 different ways: using random match probabilities (RMPs), likelihood ratios (LRs), or verbal equivalents of likelihood ratios (VEs). We found that verdicts were sensitive to the strength of DNA evidence regardless of how the expert explained it, but verdicts were sensitive to the strength of shoeprint evidence only when the expert used RMPs. The weight given to DNA evidence was consistent with the predictions of a Bayesian network model that incorporated the perceived risk of a false match from 3 causes (coincidence, a laboratory error, and a frame-up), but shoeprint evidence was undervalued relative to the same Bayesian model. Fallacious interpretations of the expert's testimony (consistent with the source probability error and the defense attorney's fallacy) were common and were associated with the weight given to the evidence and verdicts. The findings indicate that perceptions of forensic science evidence are shaped by prior beliefs and expectations as well as expert testimony and consequently that the best way to characterize and explain forensic evidence may vary across forensic disciplines.