A fascinating study has just found that hearing one person's opinion repeated is almost as effective as hearing several different people's opinions.

Repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient's sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is.

The researchers had over a thousand student volunteers read statements that were supposed to represent opinions of members of a group. In some cases, they read statements attributed to three different people, but in other cases, the identical statements were attributed to a single person. In both cases, the students believed that the statements represented the opinion of the entire group more frequently compared to when they read one statement attributed to a single individual.