Personal , medium and source-dependent trust and their influence on judgment

Due to the introduction of the World Wide Web as an information source, where editors and reviewers no longer determine what is published or not, the end user of the information must assess its credibility. Credibility indicators such as sponsorship and author are frequently missing on websites and people often have inadequate skills to determine credibility without these. As trust is a mediating factor between information quality and use, it is needed to explain information use and credibility evaluations. In this thesis a new model of interpersonal trust and its influence on credibility judgments was proposed. In this model, the trust bias is divided in three layers, propensity to trust, trust in the medium and trust in the source. An online experiment was used to validate this model, using Internet as medium and Wikipedia as source. In the experiment, participants were asked to evaluate two Wikipedia articles and were asked to rate several questions, to determine their levels of trust. Credibility judgments highly correlated with the layers of trust, trust alone explained 25% of the total variance. This experiment supports the proposed model, which can provide a framework for further research on the influence of trust on credibility.