Incredible: is (almost) all web content trustworthy? analysis of psychological factors related to website credibility evaluation

This paper describes the results of a study conducted in February 2013 on Amazon Mechanical Turk aimed at identifying various determinants of credibility evaluations. 2046 adult participants evaluated credibility of websites with diversified trustworthiness reference index. We concentrated on psychological factors that lead to the characteristic positive bias observed in many working social feedback systems on the Internet. We have used International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and measured the following traits: trust, conformity, risk taking, need for cognition and intellect. Results suggest that trustworthiness and risk taking are factors clearly differentiating people with respect to tendency to overestimate, underestimate and judge accordingly websites' credibility. Intuitively people characterized by high general trust tend to be more generous in their credibility evaluations. On the other hand, people who are more willing to take risk, tend to be more critical of the Internet content. The latter indicates that high credibility evaluations are being treated as a default option, and lower ratings require special conditions. Other, more detailed psychological patterns related to websites' credibility evaluations are described in full paper.