Stock Photos Can Take Your Intuition Down the Dark Alleys of Truthiness
Written by Daniel Derksen
"Dark Alley" by Franck Michel is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The headline of this article, like most online articles these days, is a claim accompanied by a stock photo. Normally, stock photos are meant to be eye-catching. Their purpose is not to provide evidence to support the headline’s claim. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that photos like these can increase belief in claims despite the photo containing no useful information for assessing the truth of the claim (Fenn et al., 2019; Garry et al., 2007; Sacchi et al., 2007). The photos need only to share some contextual similarity to the claim to induce feelings of truth (Newman et al., 2012). In this case, the photo of dark alley may facilitate the recall of related thoughts and feelings when reading and interpreting the headline.
Your first thought might be that some people are just prone to suggestion. However, we don’t think that is why the photos are increasing the belief in claims. Newman and colleagues (2015) asked a group of participants true-or-false trivia questions like this one:
True or false? Hippopotamus milk is bright pink.
"Baby pigmy hippo walking at the water" by Tambako the Jaguar is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
When all participants saw some trivia questions with photos and some without photos, they answered “true” more often to the photo-present trivia. Further, if the photo was completely unrelated to the statement (e.g., a photo of a giraffe), participants were more likely to say the statement was “false” when the irrelevant photo was there. However, when half the participants saw photos on every trivia question, and half saw just the statement (and no photo) on every trivia question, the truth ratings were the same between groups regardless of whether there was a photo present. Weird, huh?
What this tells us is that the comparison between photo-present trivia and photo-absent trivia matters. But why should it? If the photos are simply suggestive it shouldn’t matter whether participants were able to compare photo-present and photo-absent trials.
Instead, we argue (as Newman and colleagues have) that the photos make it easier to process and imagine the claim than when no photo is present. The subjective experience of reading the claim is different when the photo is there, and it is easier to feel that difference when the photo-absent trivia is also there. It may sound kind of kooky, but we think that the photo is impacting your intuition about how true the statement feels.
Intuition lies at the edge of consciousness (see Reber et al., 2004). Hunches and gut feelings draw on multiple sources of information so that the origin of the knowledge becomes lost. Intuition is often valuable. For example, imagine a nurse feels that a patient is about to become feverish because their vital signs or demeanor seem a bit off (despite normal body temperatures). A nurse with this hunch may ask the doctor what to do in the case of a fever, resulting in faster treatment should the intuition be correct. These subtle cues develop with knowledge and experience, are often accurate, and should not be considered necessarily error-prone (see Melin et al., 2017 for a review). But in a healthcare context, it is safer to assume that the intuition is drawn from a rich base of knowledge and experience. To compare, think back to our trivia example about the pink hippopotamus milk. The ease or difficulty of processing the claim in the presence of the photograph was probably the only cue you had available to assess whether the statement was true or false. Even though the source of the hunch came from a photograph that ought not be useful to assess the truth of the statement, the feeling of the hunch is similar to one that comes from experience.
The moral of the story is not that we should shy away from our intuition. Rather, we should evaluate whether we have the knowledge and experience to justify having the intuition in the first place. Understanding how something as simple as a contextually-related photo can create a subjective experience akin to a “truthy” intuition should make us question the sources of our gut feelings.
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References
Fenn, E., Ramsa, N., Kantner, J., Pezdek, K., & Abed, E. (2019). Nonprobative photos increase truth, like, and share
judgments in a simulated social media environment. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 8,
131-138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2019.04.005
Garry, M., Strange, D., Bernstein, D. M., & Kinzett, T. (2007). Photographs can distort memory for the news. Applied
Cognitive Psychology, 21(8), 995–1004. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1362
Melin, J. C., Palmqvist, R., & Rönnberg, L. (2017). Clinical intuition in the nursing process and decision‐making—A
mixed‐studies review. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 26(23–24), 3936–3949. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.13814
Newman, E. J., Garry, M., Bernstein, D. M., Kantner, J., & Lindsay, D. S. (2012). Nonprobative photographs (or words)
inflate truthiness. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 19, 969-974. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-012-0292-0
Newman, E. J., Garry, M., Unkelbach, C., Bernstein, D. M., Lindsay, D. S., & Nash, R. A. (2015). Truthiness and falsiness of
trivia claims depend on judgmental contexts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 41(5), 13-37. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000099
Reber, R., Wurtz, P., & Zimmermann, T. D. (2004). Exploring “fringe” consciousness: The subjective experience of
perceptual fluency and its objective bases. Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal, 13(1), 47–60.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1053-8100(03)00049-7
Sacchi, D. L. M., Agnoli, F., & Loftus, E. F. (2007). Changing history: Doctored photographs affect memory for past
public events. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21(8), 1005–1022. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1394
Disclaimer
The blog posts are for informational and educational purposes only. The posts should not be considered as any type of advice (medical, mental health, legal, and/or religious advice). All blog posts have been researched, written, and edited by the undergraduate students and alumni of the Lifespan Cognition Lab. As a teaching and research-based lab, we encourage all lab members to help make knowledge more accessible to all communities through these posts.
