“Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing fluency…In Experiment 1, we showed participants trivia statements up to 9 times and in Experiment 2 statements were shown up to 27 times…In both experiments, we found that perceived truthfulness increased as the number of repetitions increased. However, these truth rating increases were logarithmic in shape. The largest increase in perceived truth came from encountering a statement for the second time, and beyond this were incrementally smaller increases in perceived truth for each additional repetition.”
My take (from authors): “Although believing repeated information to be true is evolutionarily efficient in a context where most of the information encountered is correct, it can be detrimental to believe information that is incorrect.”
The authors, representing the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), assert that “there aren’t always right answers, but some answers are clearly wrong.” In their commentary, they note that there is “growing allegiance to crowd-endorsed ‘facts.'” Yet, they expect physicians to adhere to higher standards; however, they note the inherent conflict between speech that can be prohibited by licensing boards and speech protected by the First Amendment.
Dietary supplements are another part of medicine with rampant misinformation. In fact, there is nearly ubiquitous misinformation through advertisements across all media segments. Americans spent ~$55 billion on dietary supplements in 2020. This commentary discusses a Senate bill, the Dietary Supplement Listing Act of 2022, which ostensibly would improve this situation.
However, this is NOT the case. This bill requires manufacturers to provide the FDA with a product’s name, ingredients and health claims. It mandates the FDA create a searchable database. What the legislation doesn’t do:
Provide the the FDA with a mechanism to confirm a product’s ingredients
Enable regulation of misleading health claims
Stop the promotion and sale of supplements with dangerous ingredients
Allow the FDA to remove products from its registry determined to have unlawful ingredients and remove products deemed hazardous
My take: This legislation needs to be strengthened to limit deception. In its current form, this registry would appear to confer FDA oversight to dietary supplements (which is minimal) and paradoxically legitimize dietary supplements .
gutsandgrowth 