A fluent statement is accepted without checking it for accuracy

Evidence

You could think of fluency as the brain’s attempt at making a fast and intuitive truth-judgment as opposed to a more deliberate, analytical assessment. Of course, the fact that the brain processes familiar things more fluently isn’t a bad thing in itself. In fact, in all likelihood it’s probably a useful and adaptive heuristic, or rule of thumb, in many situations. It would be absolutely exhausting for your brain if you had to process every bit of information completely anew. You know that 2 × 2 = 4 when you read it – this has been repeated to you many times, you can process it fast and fluently. The real problem is that something can be true or false for many reasons other than familiarity. If I were to ask you, for example, how many animals of each kind Moses took with him on the Ark, most people would say ‘two, despite the fact that in the biblical story it wasn’t Moses on the Ark, it was Noah. This doesn’t matter to your brain though; it’s just predicting familiar answers. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 86

Categorization

• CANDY: The Moses-on-the-Ark illusion is a great party fact: most people answer two even though it was Noah.
• XREF: connects to: The ease of processing a statement influences how true it seems — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 84; Repeating a statement increases belief in its truth regardless of accuracy — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 65; People apply established procedures without re-evaluating marginally different situations

Broader Connections

• The ease of processing a statement influences how true it seems #expands (0.85) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 84
• Repeating a statement increases belief in its truth regardless of accuracy #expands (0.80) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 65
• People apply established procedures without re-evaluating marginally different situations #expands (0.75)