Human values and trust in scientific journals, the mainstream media and fake news

What factors influence trust in online information? Americans increasingly get information from social media, public distrust in the mainstream media is growing and “fake news” is an important new phenomenon. This paper examines the factors that influence trust in scientific claims posted via social media, including the use of hyperlinks and readers' values. The paper describes a crowdsourcing-based experimental design using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. The core of the experiment was a set of 10 scientific findings reported in open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals, which were in turn linked to in articles in both the mainstream media and “fake news” sites. Data analysis involved exploration of relationships between trust and the presence or absence of hyperlinks, and between trust and human values using nonparametric statistical methods. In terms of the influence of hyperlinks on trust, inclusion of hyperlinks to scientific journals, mainstream media articles, and even hidden URLs led to higher trust than hyperlinks to “fake news” sites or posts without hyperlinks (p < 0.001). Participants who clicked on hyperlinks to scientific articles placed higher trust in the claims than those who did not (p < 0.001). In terms of the influence of values on trust, values had the most impact in cases where individuals saw, but decided not to click on, hyperlinks; this finding seems to indicate that in the absence of firsthand examination of the hyperlinked sites, participants tend to rely more heavily on their values to determine their trust in a scientific claim. These findings indicate that both the presence and absence of hyperlinks and the values of the reader both significantly impact trust judgments. © 2017 Nitin Verma, Kenneth R. Fleischmann, and Kolina S. Koltai