Examining gullibility with sentence verification judgments

Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to examine gullibility as measured by people’s bias to respond with a True response when performing sentence verification judgment task. The experiments manipulated the location of unfamiliar concepts such that some sentences contained unfamiliar concepts in the subject while other sentences contained unfamiliar concepts in the predicate, hence measuring the bias to judge an idea to be true when one cannot make the decision relying on background knowledge. The results indicated: 1) a higher frequency of True response when an unfamiliar concept is located in the subject compared to when it is in the predicate; and 2) the frequency of True response was lower than chance level even when unfamiliar information is located in the subject. The results were discussed in relation to gullibility and how the verification judgment is processed as a plausibility judgment.

Keywords:

• verification judgment
• gullibility
• epistemic vigilance
• sentence comprehension

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.