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Trust across Disciplines

Sources role in trust - Regarding psychology

There are four main basic sources for beliefs: perception, communication, memory and reasoning. Every one of these sources should be evaluated regarding its accuracy, credibility, trustworhiness and so on, that is any agent, before accepting a new piece of knowledge, must consider if he trust his perceptions, another agent, his memory or his inferences as a source of reliable information. Trust in sources is relevant to topics such as belief revision, information gathering, knowledge management, and so on.

Trust in sources has been studied most of all as credibility of the sources of information, that is how much (or how little) a piece of information given by a determined source is corresponding to this source's vision of the world or, in other words, is considered true according to what this source believes. This kind of research considers credibility as an evaluation about the sincerity of a source.

B. J. Fogg

[Fogg and the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University have been studying credibility of Web sites since 2001, with several online questionnaires and experiments. Their results are interesting because they differ from the classic Consumer Reports WebWatch Guidelines.]

Credibility can be defined as believability [and it] is a perceived quality; it doesn't reside in an object, a person, or a piece of information. Therefore, in discussing the credibility of a computer product, one is always discussing the perception of credibility. [...] Scholars agree that credibility perceptions result from evaluating multiple dimensions simultaneously. [...] The vast majority of researchers identify two key components of credibility: trustworthiness and expertise. [...]

[Fogg's experiments demonstrated that] when people assessed a real Web site's credibility they did not use rigorous criteria. The average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.

A relatively small number of consumers registered credibility assessment comments that related to Consumer WebWatch's five general guidelines for improving credibility on the Web: Identity, Advertising and Sponsorships, Customer Service, Corrections, and Privacy.

[In a different study, Fogg et al. tried to examine the differences between experts and average users.] Experts were far less concerned about visual appeal as a marker of credibility than the [average] consumers, and they were more concerned about the quality of a site's information. [...] This study found that health experts assigned more credibility to health sites that provided information from reputable sources and cited the names and credentials of authors for each article published. Finance experts assigned more credibility to finance sites that provided investors with a great deal of unbiased educational information and research, rather than nudging consumers toward their own products or services. [...] Both groups [of experts] remark[ed] that an easy-to-use information design is crucial.

[These studies led to the development of a theory of credibility, named The Prominance-Interpretation Theory. This theory] posits that two things happen when people assess credibility online: 1) The user notices something (Prominence), and 2) The user makes a judgment about it (Interpretation). If one or the other does not happen, then there is no credibility assessment. The process of noticing a prominent element and making an interpretation happens more than once when a person evaluates a Web site, with new aspects of the site being noticed and interpreted as the user makes an overall assessment of credibility. The first component in the theory is Prominence, [or] the likelihood that a Web site element will be noticed or perceived. The second component of the theory is Interpretation, [which] is a person's judgment about an element under examination.

[This theory can solve the differences between the classic guidelines and the results from the on-field research conducted by Fogg and his group:] the first study focused solely on Interpretation. [...] Researchers called people on the telephone and asked them to evaluate the impact a site's privacy policy would have on perceived credibility. In contrast, the second study focused on Prominence. Study participants visited actual Web sites to evaluate credibility. In the second situation users almost never noticed a site's privacy policy. These two studies reached different conclusions because they examined different components of credibility assessment.

References

Fogg BJ, Marshall J., Laraki O., Osipovich A., Varma C., Fang N., Paul J., Rangnekar A., Shon J., Swani P. and Treinen M. (2001). What Makes Web Sites Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study. CHI Letters, 1, 61-68. Electronic version available.

Fogg BJ, Marable L, Stanford J. and Tauber ER. (2002). How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility? Results from a Large Study. Persuasive Technology Lab. Stanford University. Electronic version available.

Stanford J., Tauber ER, Fogg BJ and Marable L. (2002). Experts vs. Online Consumers: A Comparative Credibility Study of Health and Finance Web Sites. Persuasive Technology Lab. Stanford University. Electronic version available.

Fogg BJ. (2003). Prominence-Interpretation Theory: Explaining How People Assess Credibility Online. Proceedings of the CHI 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 722-723. Electronic version available.

If you like to read more about Fogg and Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, visit the Web Credibility Project.

More information about credibility for Web sites can be found on Consumer WebWatch site.

Other perspectives on sources

This topic is studied also in computer science with a theory about referral systems and belief revision algorithms. Moreover, our socio-cognitive approach tries to distinguish trust and credibility for a better explanation of the role of sources in trust.