If we hear a white supremacist who says that Barack Obama only cares about black people we should immediately suspect that this information is wrong because the source is non-credible. Yet as time goes by, we forget about the source of the information and the message becomes more persuasive. This delayed persuasion is called the sleeper effect.
The sleeper effect was originally proposed by Hovland, Lumsdaine and Sheffield (1949) but the evidence has been somewhat inconclusive. Yet evidence has accumulated over the decades and in a relatively recent meta-analysis Kumkale and Albarracín (2004) concluded that the sleeper effect exists.
Why is this important? In politics there are a number of lies that are spread around. For example, if a four-time convicted felon says something about the Clintons, we should be suspicious about the truth value in these statements. The sad part is that even though we know he is probably wrong, his message tends to have stronger effect over time.
The campaign is long. There is room for many false claims by untrustworthy sources. Once we reach the beginning of November for the general election, it is possible that all these false claims have increased in force and we have forgotten who was responsible for the lies. The only thing we know at this point is that politicians cannot be trusted.
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