Influences of source bias that differ from source untrustworthiness: When flip-flopping is more and less surprising.

Abstract

Discussions of the difference between biased and fake news were prevalent after the 2016 United States Presidential election. However, within social psychology, and especially the psychology of persuasion, perceptions of source bias have been largely overlooked or conflated with untrustworthiness. In the current work, we sought to demonstrate that bias and untrustworthiness can have differing effects. One such situation is when persuasive sources originally take one position but switch to a different position (flip-flopping). We find that people expect biased versus objective sources to consistently maintain their position. Conversely, people do not have these expectations for untrustworthy versus trustworthy sources. When sources unexpectedly switch positions, people can infer that they must have switched because of strong evidence in support of the new position. As a result, taking an unexpected position can lead a source to be more persuasive. This package includes a final study with a preregistered analysis plan that uses latent variable modeling, as well as an integrative data analysis across all data we have to test these hypotheses. Ultimately, this work suggests that bias and untrustworthiness can have differing indirect influences on persuasion when sources switch positions, highlighting the need to conceptually separate bias and untrustworthiness and examine their individual effects. These persuasive effects function as an illustrative example of differing influences of bias and untrustworthiness, but we expect this distinction to have theoretical implications across domains of social psychology and practical applications for media producers and consumers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).