Contradict them softly! Contradictions of the subject feel less true than contradictions of the object.

Abstract

Individuals attribute a higher truth value to repeated compared to novel information, the well-known truth effect. Also, information that contradicts what we have heard earlier is considered falser than both repeated and completely new information, known as the contradiction effect. These two effects are a challenge to the correction of misinformation because one cannot easily correct earlier misleading claims. In the present paper, we show a new and important factor that enhances the effectiveness of corrections, the syntactic placement of the contradiction. We argue that because the subject of a sentence has a stronger psychological importance than the object, a contradiction of the subject (compared to the object) is felt as a stronger contrast to the earlier information and thus experienced as more false. Experiments 1 and 2 provided null results, possibly due to confounding material and task. Crucially, Experiments 3-5 (total N = 628) reliably showed that contradictions of the subject were perceived to be falser than contradictions of the object.