The Lacuna Project

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Exhibit 1099

The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings

Exhibit 1099 ยท Peer-reviewed article

The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings

an implied truth effect, whereby false headlines that fail to get tagged are considered validated and thus are seen as more accurate.

Two MTurk experiments (n = 5,271 and 1,568) and a Bayesian model. Warnings modestly reduce perceived accuracy of tagged false headlines, but untagged false headlines are seen as more accurate; attaching verifications to some true headlines eliminates the effect.

Source
Pennycook, Bear, Collins and Rand, Management Science 66(11):4944-4957
Date
2020
Quoted from
Abstract
Grade
Peer-reviewed
Document
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3478
Accessed
2026-11-10
Cited by
Findings citing this exhibit
Note
Crossref abstract, retrieved 10 November 2026. Quote read in the abstract as served by the OpenAlex API; confirm against the publisher page before publication.

Cited by

Finding INF-5.12
Peer-reviewed Two experiments (n = 5,271 and n = 1,568) found that false headlines without warnings were seen as more accurate when other headlines carried warnings, and a later study found that wrongly labeling accurate news as inaccurate reduced its credibility. In two online experiments (N = 150 and N = 802), items labeled "conspiracy theories" were judged no less likely than the same items labeled "ideas."