Perceived truth of statements and simulated social media postings: an experimental investigation of source credibility, repeated exposure, and presentation format.

To better understand the spread of fake news in the Internet age, it is important to uncover the variables that influence the perceived truth of information. Although previous research identified several reliable predictors of truth judgments-such as source credibility, repeated information exposure, and presentation format-little is known about their simultaneous effects. In a series of four experiments, we investigated how the abovementioned factors jointly affect the perceived truth of statements (Experiments 1 and 2) and simulated social media postings (Experiments 3 and 4).