Readers trust journalists less once they refute moderately than confirm claims

Pointing out that others are incorrect is an element of life. And journalists should do that every one the time – it's a part of their job to differentiate truth from lies. But what if people just don't wish to hear corrections?

Our recent research, published within the journal Communication Researchsuggests that that is the case. In two studies, we found that folks generally trust journalists once they confirm the reality of claims, but are more suspicious when journalists correct false claims.

Some linguistics And Social Sciences Theories suggest that folks intuitively understand that social expectations usually are not negative. Being unkind, reminiscent of mentioning someone's lie or mistake, carries the danger of a backlash.

We conclude that corrections are subject to a special, more critical standard than confirmations. Attempts to refute something can raise doubts in regards to the honesty and motives of journalists. In other words, should you provide a correction, you’re a little bit of a spoilsport, and that might negatively affect how you’re perceived.

How we worked

Using real articles, we examined what people take into consideration journalists who do “fact-checking.”

In our first study, participants read an in depth fact check that either corrected or confirmed a political or economic claim. For example, one focused on the statement “Congressional salaries have increased 231% over the past 30 years,” which is fake. We then asked participants how they rated the actual fact check and the journalist who wrote it.

Although people generally trust journalists quite a bit, more people expressed distrust of journalists who provided corrections than of those that provided confirmations. People were less skeptical of confirmatory fact-checks than of debunking articles. The percentage of respondents who expressed strong distrust doubled, from about 10% to about 22%.

Respondents also said they need more information to know whether journalists who refute statements are telling the reality than their assessment of journalists who confirm the claims.

In a second study, we presented marketing claims that ultimately turned out to be true or false. For example, some participants read an article a couple of brand that claimed its cooking tricks would save time, but the truth is they didn't work. Others read an article a couple of brand that offered cooking tricks that turned out to be true.

Again, across several product types, respondents said they needed more evidence to consider articles that exposed falsehoods and said they were more distrustful of journalists who corrected errors.

Why it will be significant

Correcting misinformation is notoriously difficultas researchers and journalists have discovered. The United States can be experiencing a decades-long Decline in trust in journalism. Fact-checking is meant to assist combat misinformation and disinformation, but our research shows that its usefulness is restricted. When journalists debunk facts, it will possibly create the impression that they only make negative statements.

Our second study also explains a component of popular culture: the backlash against someone exposing one other’s misdeeds. For example, should you read an article If you indicate that a band has lied about its origin story, you might find that it create a sub-controversy within the comments from people who find themselves offended that anyone was even alerted to it, and rightly so. This scenario is strictly what we’d expect if fixes were robotically reviewed and distrusted by some people.

What's next

Future work can explore how journalists may be transparent without undermining trust. It is affordable to assume that folks will trust a journalist more if the journalist explains how they got here to a specific conclusion. However, our results suggest that this will not be entirely the case. Rather, trust is determined by what the conclusion is.

Participants in our studies were very trusting of journalists once they provided confirmations. And in fact, sometimes people haven’t any problem with corrections, for instance when a blatant piece of misinformation that they don't consider anyway is debunked. The challenge for journalists is perhaps to determine find out how to provide debunking without coming across as a debunker.

The Research Brief is a summary of interesting scientific papers.