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Abstract A hallmark of the Trump presidency was a stream of false statements, many of which were repeated dozens or even hundreds of times. But whether (and to what extent) this repetition translates into public misperceptions remains an open question. We address this question by leveraging the most comprehensive data on Trump’s repetition of misleading claims during his presidency. In a national survey asking Americans to evaluate the truth of claims from this database, we find a clear partisan asymmetry. An increase in the number of repetitions of a falsehood corresponded with increased belief among Republicans but decreased belief among Democrats. We also find an important moderating role of media consumption. The effects of repetition were larger when people consumed more right-leaning cable news and when falsehoods were mostly repeated on Twitter. We discuss implications of these findings for misinformation research. 

Fact-checkers want people to both read and remember their misinformation debunks. Retrieval practice is one way to increase memory, thus multiple-choice quizzes may be a useful tool for fact-checkers. We tested whether exposure to quizzes improved people’s accuracy ratings for fact-checked claims and their memory for specific information within a fact check. Across three experiments, 1551 US-based online participants viewed fact checks (either health- or politics-related) with or without a quiz. Overall, the fact checks were effective, and participants were more accurate in rating the claims after exposure. In addition, quizzes improved participants’ memory for the details of the fact checks, even 1 week later. However, that increased memory did not lead to more accurate beliefs. Participants’ accuracy ratings were similar in the quiz and no-quiz conditions. Multiple-choice quizzes can be a useful tool for increasing memory, but there is a disconnect between memory and belief. 

When news about moral transgressions goes viral on social media, the same person may repeatedly encounter identical reports about a wrongdoing. In a longitudinal experiment ( N = 607 U.S. adults from Mechanical Turk), we found that these repeated encounters can affect moral judgments. As participants went about their lives, we text-messaged them news headlines describing corporate wrongdoings (e.g., a cosmetics company harming animals). After 15 days, they rated these wrongdoings as less unethical than new wrongdoings. Extending prior laboratory research, these findings reveal that repetition can have a lasting effect on moral judgments in naturalistic settings, that affect plays a key role, and that increasing the number of repetitions generally makes moral judgments more lenient. Repetition also made fictitious descriptions of wrongdoing seem truer, connecting this moral-repetition effect with past work on the illusory-truth effect. The more times we hear about a wrongdoing, the more we may believe it—but the less we may care.