Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Exposure to images constitutes a ubiquitous day-to-dayexperience for most individuals. From mass-media exposure,to engagement with social-networking sites, to educationalcontexts, we are bombarded with images. Here, we explore theeffect that emotional images have on belief endorsement. Toinvestigate this effect, we test whether statements accompaniedby emotionally arousing images become more or lessbelievable than the same statements when they areaccompanied by neutral images or by no images. We find thatemotional images increase statement believability (Experiment1, replicated in preregistered Experiment 2). We discuss theimplications of this finding in the context of interventionsaimed at reducing misinformation.