A photo beside a fake news story makes you believe it.
A new study about false memories, recently published in the journal Acta Psychologica reports a fake news headline is more likely to be accepted as factual if it is accompanied by a tangentially related photograph.
The results fit with the idea that photographs provide cognitive scaffolding leading to the fluent mental processing we associate — accurately or inaccurately — with genuine experience.
The researchers showed subjects a mixture of true and fictional news headlines, some of which were accompanied by photographs while others were not.
The researchers found that, for both the true and false headlines, the percentage of participants who claimed to remember the event was higher when the words were accompanied by a photograph.
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