🔋ATP#12: How Repetition Tricks the Brain, a.k.a. How to Make People Believe You More

First of all: I messed up. A few days ago, I noticed that I had several messages in my Spam folder.

The first thing I messed up: I hadn’t checked the Spam folder for at least two months. So, if you responded to any of my newsletters and landed in my Spam folder 30+ days ago, I never saw your message because they got deleted automatically after 1 month ☹️

And I messed up even more: I took a look at the emails in my Spam folder and saw several replies to my newsletter. I have a routine on my other email account to quickly scan the messages in my Spam folder and then press the “delete all spam messages now” link.

Without thinking, I did the same and saw your messages disappearing. 😢 I googled how to get them back, but once they’re gone, they’re gone.

I have now moved my Spam folder from hidden to visible, and the moment of desperation I experienced after accidentally deleting your messages will prevent me from doing something similar anytime soon.

So if you replied at some point and never heard back from me: I didn’t ghost you. I messed up!

Now that I've got this off my chest, onto this week’s newsletter:

Aldous Huxley always knew it.

In “A Brave New World”, he wrote: “62,400 repetitions make one truth”.

He was right - and today we know that even one repetition is enough to make you believe information more.

How?

Let me tell you about an experiment we conducted a few years ago with my former student Tanja, who did her B. Sc. thesis under my supervision.

We created a pool of 204 statements with an unclear truth status, i.e., most people don’t know if they’re true or false.

Here are some examples:

• The vacuum cleaner was invented in the US. [true]

• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. [true]

• The writer Grazia Deledda was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. [false]

• Magma can reach temperatures of up to 2200°C. [false]

Participants came in for a first testing session, and we presented them with half of the 204 statements, 50% false and 50% true.

Participants read each statement and then evaluated how true they thought it was on a 6-point scale ranging from “definitely false” to “definitely true”.

After a week, they returned to the lab, and we presented them with all 204 statements, which they evaluated again on a 6-point scale.

So: 102 statements were repeated (because we had presented them the week before) and 102 were new.

The result: Participants judged the repeated items to be more true than the new ones, regardless of their actual truth status.

In other words: The mere repetition of the statements made people believe them more.

This isn’t an isolated finding; it has been replicated numerous times by researchers worldwide. It’s called the truth effect or illusory truth in the literature.

The power of repetition

First of all, repetition refers to encountering the same information repeatedly, which isn’t limited to statements but also includes people, images, etc.

You already know that the mere repetition of a statement makes you believe it more, irrespective of whether it’s true or not.

Let’s look at an example from a different context:

A famous study from the 1950s analyzed friendships in a student dorm and found: The closer two students lived together, the more likely they were friends.

Why?

They saw each other more frequently. That’s the power of repetition!

Social psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the mere exposure effect. More exposure to someone or something makes you more likely to like them or it.

Why is repetition so powerful?

The most common explanation for these phenomena is that your brain prefers information it already knows. Novelty always comes with a potential danger, so it’s better to rely on what is already familiar.

Regarding information repetition, researchers discuss cognitive fluency: it implies that repeated information is easier to process and requires less mental effort than new information. Processing repeated information just feels better, and this subjective ease is interpreted as “this must be true”.

People are often unaware that the information is repeated and still judge repeated information as more true than new information.

How you can leverage the power of repetition

Repetition leads to more liking and a stronger belief. Politicians and marketers are aware of and utilize the principle of repetition.

In marketing, repeated advertising of the same product increases your likelihood of purchase. Many brands or products use slogans and repeat them frequently to boost the effects of repetition.

But using the principle of repetition can also be dangerous, e.g., in politics, where fake news campaigns exemplify how it can damage society: Fake news are repeated over and over until people believe them.

So please, use these principles responsibly.

How to implement them:

• Want people to believe you more? Repeat information often.

• Want someone to like you more? Cross their path more often.

• Want to sell more of your product? Advertise frequently and maintain a consistent branding and message.

Repetition builds trust. Repetition builds belief. Repetition builds truth.

If this edition provided you with valuable new insights, you can buy me a coffee here. ☕ That’s how I keep this newsletter free.

Until next time!

Best wishes,

Patricia (Dr. Schmidt) from creatorschmidt.com.