DETERMINANTS OF JUDGED VALIDITY

Prior research has shown that repeating a statement results in an increase in its judged validity. One explanation that has been advanced to account for this finding is that familiarity is used as a basis to assess validity. Another explanation is that when subjects dissociate a statement from its true source, that statement is judged to be more valid. According to this latter explanation, repeated statements tend to be seen as more valid because each presentation is perceived as coming from different sources. Hence repeated statements benefit from perceived convergent validity. Experiment 1 tested these two explanations by presenting 40 statements during one session and repeating 20 of them amid 20 new ones either 1, 3, or 5 weeks later. A causal analysis lent support to both explanations, although source dissociation was found not to be a necessary condition for the validity-enhancing effect of repetition. Experiments 2 and 3 were designed to examine the boundary conditions for the influence of repetition on perceived validity. In Experiment 2 half of the subjects heard sentences about China, whereas the other half of the subjects heard control sentences. A week later (Week 2) one-third of the subjects in each of these two groups read passages about the specific topics covered by the China sentences, one-third read about other topics dealing with China, and one-third read control passages having nothing to do with China. One week later all subjects gave validity ratings to various sentences pertaining to China, including those seen during Week 1. The results indicated that hearing any passage having to do with China during Week 2 caused subjects to increase their judged validity of the China sentences originally seen during Week 1. In Experiment 3 some sentences were repeated each week over a 6-week period. The difference in rated validity between the repeated and nonrepeated statements was manifested by the second week and persisted during subsequent repetitions. The results of the three experiments were compared to findings in the semantic priming literature. © 1991.