Types of Truth: How Perceived & Objective Truth Guide Belief Change
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: People must navigate socially transmitted information that varies from accurate to misleading or false. Here, we examined how perceived and objective truth predict belief change across three studies. In Study 1, four web-enabled frontier large language models (LLMs) and 200 human raters evaluated claims from two fact-checked datasets. LLMs outperformed humans in inter-rater agreement and discriminative sensitivity, supporting their use as a scalable proxy for objective truth. In Study 2 and 3, we applied this proxy to two large message corpora and examined its association with belief change. Perceived truth and LLM-derived objective truth independently predicted belief change. Moreover, objective truth moderated the association between perceived truth and belief change: the association between perceived truth and belief change was strongest for messages with lower objective truth and weakened as objective truth increased. These findings suggest that belief change reflects both subjective truth evaluations and the correspondence of information with reality.
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224884229