Photographs Elevate Truth Judgments About Less Well-Known People (But Not Yourself)

When people judge the veracity of statements, nonprobative photos increase “true” responses relative to when statements appear alone-“truthiness.” Two experiments tested whether photos influence truth judgments about people's personality traits as a function of the amount of knowledge possessed about the target person. In Experiment 1, participants indicated whether traits described an unknown person presented with varying amounts of descriptive information. Photos inflated truth judgments only with minimal information provided. In Experiment 2, photos inflated truth judgments for an unknown person but not for a best friend or one's self. When judging veracity, photos help prime related thoughts and images, increasing processing fluency, a metacognitive cue to truth. Consistent with findings that fluency effects result from the discrepancy between expected and actual fluency, it appears that it is the amount of information primed by the photo relative to that primed by other sources that affects how photos influence truthiness.