Decision context
Checking claims & misinformation
Use these evidence-reviewed lenses when deciding whether a repeated claim is trustworthy, checking a correction, or testing an explanation against plausible alternatives.
Decision skill
Information verification
Check where information came from, whether sources are independent and whether a correction has really replaced the old explanation.
Learning outcome: You can verify important claims without treating repetition as independent confirmation.
When it matters
Notice the situation before naming the bias.
- A claim feels familiar because it has appeared repeatedly.
- Several summaries may all depend on the same original source.
- A correction was issued but the old story still shapes later reasoning.
- Generated answers repeat a claim without showing where it came from.
Practice the skill
Use a better reasoning move.
- Trace the claim to the earliest reliable or primary source you can inspect.
- Count independent sources, not repetitions.
- After a correction, restate the supported replacement explanation explicitly.
- Mark claims as verified, unverified or disputed instead of flattening them into one confidence level.
Decision contexts
Apply the skill to real kinds of decisions.
Decision context
AI-assisted decisions
Use these evidence-reviewed lenses when a chatbot, model, recommendation system, or automated decision aid is influencing what you believe or do.
Evidence-reviewed lenses
Patterns worth checking, not labels for people.
Several patterns can fit the same situation. Use these lenses to ask better questions, then inspect the evidence behind each concept.
Illusory Truth Effect
Repeated claims receive higher truth ratings than comparable new claims on average, but the effect is heterogeneous and does not generalize equally to every kind of statement. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis covering 182 studies, 366 effect sizes and more than 31,000 participants found a reliable corrected average effect. A later 2026 paper with two preregistered experiments found little or no meaningful repetition effect for social-political opinion statements. The useful claim is therefore narrower than 'repeat anything and people will believe it.'
robust average effect with important content boundary conditions Read evidence review
Continued Influence Effect
The continued influence effect describes a specific pattern: false or outdated information can keep affecting later reasoning even after a clear correction. It does not mean the correction had no effect, that the person rejected the correction, or that belief in the false claim became stronger. Corrections often reduce misinformation reliance without removing it completely. That distinction matters because continued influence is much broader than the rarer backfire outcome.
well-established persistence after correction; corrections usually still help Read evidence review
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is an umbrella label for several ways existing beliefs or hypotheses can influence information search and interpretation. It should not be reduced to one behaviour such as reading only agreeable news, and a preference for confirming tests is not irrational in every task or environment.
well established, broad construct Read evidence review
Availability Heuristic
Availability is a judgment heuristic: people can use how easily examples or scenarios come to mind when estimating frequency or probability. That shortcut is not automatically an error because memorable or accessible examples can correlate with real frequency. Bias appears when accessibility is driven by factors that are not diagnostic of the quantity being judged.
established heuristic; bias is context-dependent Read evidence review
Use it with an AI agent
Install this decision workflow as an Agent Skill.
The portable version uses the same decision method and keeps bias labels as evidence-aware lenses rather than diagnoses.
Practice this skill
Apply the capability across real decisions.
A claim appears in ten articles. Following the links shows that nine articles cite the tenth, which cites one small report.
Skill: Information verificationOpen scenario →A report corrects a false explanation for an event but gives no supported alternative. Later discussions still use the old explanation because it is the only coherent story people remember.
Skill: Information verificationOpen scenario →You have seen the same claim in several Instagram-style posts during the week. Some posts also show many likes. By Friday the claim feels familiar and easy to accept.
Skill: Information verificationOpen scenario →