trust
Definition
Trust refers to the degree of confidence that individuals place in a source of information, shaping whether they accept or reject fact-checking claims made by others. In polarized social media environments, ingroup sources command higher trust but are less likely to provide opinions that conflict with a user's existing beliefs, while outgroup sources generate more dissonant fact-checks but inspire less confidence. This tension means that trust, cognitive dissonance, and crowd size operate in opposition rather than in concert. A crowdsourcing intervention therefore succeeds or fails depending on how well it balances these competing demands, because trust in the fact-checking source is one of three psychological factors that determine whether exposure to collective accuracy judgments produces genuine belief updating.
Sources: Pretus et al. (2024)
Related Terms
- misinformation (1 shared article)
- crowdsourcing (1 shared article)
- fact-checking (1 shared article)
- network analysis (1 shared article)
Applications
Trust and Partisan Misinformation
Trust in a fact-checking source interacts directly with partisan identity, because extreme partisans extend confidence primarily to ingroup sources while dismissing corrections that originate outside their ideological community. Crowdsourcing interventions can work around this constraint by connecting users with sources from neighboring communities rather than distant outgroups, a configuration that preserves enough trust to make dissonant fact-checks credible.
Sources: Pretus et al. (2024)
Trust and Crowd Size
Trust and crowd size are structurally linked within the model presented for crowdsourcing interventions: sources that a given user trusts are less likely to flag content as misleading, which keeps the effective crowd small and reduces the persuasive weight of the aggregate signal. Scaling fact-checking crowds therefore requires accepting some reduction in average source trustworthiness, a trade-off that algorithmic network methods are proposed to manage.
Sources: Pretus et al. (2024)
