Gallup/Knight Find Troubling Trend in Media Trust

Recent research from Gallup and Knight Foundation investigated how the use of opinion- or behavior-based metrics influenced study participants’ level of trust in the media.  Each participant was randomly assigned to an experimental group that viewed a news article and certain average historical trust ratings of the news source. Based on their experimental group, individuals saw ratings of their own (personal), all users of the platform (community), people similar to the news consumer (“people like you,” based on gender, political affiliation, age and other factors), a combination of personal ratings and either community or “people like you” ratings, or none of the aggregated trust indicators (control group). The findings of this experiment suggest that viewing aggregated trust ratings that convey group opinion affects a consumer’s trust in the news. Participants who viewed either the community average trust rating or the “people like you” average tended to be less trusting of the articles they read, compared with the groups who viewed their own past behavior or no past ratings. Participants who saw their own historical average trust rating generally remained consistent in how they rated news outlets before versus during the experiment. This study shows how malleable Americans’ trust in the news can be when exposed to group opinions, and it shows how difficult it may be to break the trend of declining trust in the media. It seems that the more people know, the more skeptical they become.