Credibility Effects

Abstract

The importance of credibility in human communication had already been recognized long before modern communication research emerged as a scientific discipline. For ancient rhetoricians like Aristotle or Cicero it was self‐evident that the credibility of a communicator had an important impact on the persuasiveness of his performance (→ Rhetorical Studies; Rhetoric, Greek). At the beginning of the twentieth century credibility became a central concept in communication research, first in → propaganda, later in other areas such as → advertising or → political communication. Today, the field of research is quite complex: different research traditions have bred a considerable number of definitions, operationalizations, and findings. Three major models of credibility can be distinguished: the source model, the recipient model, and the experience model. Modern research has come to the conclusion that there is no linear relationship between the credibility of a communication source and the effectiveness of its persuasive efforts. The magnitude as well as the persistence of credibility effects depend on several intervening variables (→ Journalists, Credibility of; Credibility of Content).