Summary: Behavioral study of expectation in media

[Commentary] We designed a study aimed to determine whether participants’ trust in the information contained within an online news article is altered by changing the brand of the article, by demographic factors, and by readership habits such as regularly accessing news online or in print. Given prior findings in analogous disciplines based upon expectation and trust in media, we hypothesized that participants would show more trust in older, established print publications known for investigative journalism, like The New Yorker, than they would in more recently established publications online, like Buzzfeed. Further, we expected that people who reported more journalism readership would be more aware of brands and, consequently, more willing to trust information from known sources.

We found that while, on average, participants were more likely to trust rather than not trust the publication in line with our hypotheses, participants who read the article in the Buzzfeed shell reported lower positive trust and higher negative trust, relative to those who read the article in the New Yorker shell. We found a trending similar result in the same direction when we examined the data in terms of informational content. There was no difference in reported trust from those who read the article in the New Yorker or Buzzfeed shells relative to the shell for the neutral publication, The Review, whose trust responses fell between the other two groups. Similarly, we did not find this relationship in bias reports for the protagonist or government or in writer credibility.

[Jenna Reinen is a postdoctoral psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at Yale.]