Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism

by Seyward Darby

Among the chinks in our intellectual armor is a susceptibility to repetition. Research shows that people become more credulous of an idea the more times they encounter it. In what’s known as the illusory truth effect, people are more likely to perceive statements that they’ve encountered on multiple occasions as true even if they already know the statements are false. “Reading a statement like ‘A sari is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots’ increased participants’ later belief that it was true,” a 2015 study notes, “even if they could correctly answer the question ‘What is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots?’”