Abstract
Advertising is seen as an untrustworthy source because of the perceived self-interest of the advertisers in presenting product information in a biased or misleading way. Regulations require advertising messages in print and online media to be labeled as advertisements to allow recipients to take source information into account when judging the credibility of the messages. To date, little is known about how these source tags are remembered. Research within the source-monitoring framework suggests that source attributions are not only based on veridical source memory but are often reconstructed through schematic guessing. In two experiments, we examined how the credibility of advertising messages affects these source attribution processes. The source of the messages affected judgments of credibility at the time of encoding, but the source tags were forgotten after a short period of time. Retrospective source attributions in the absence of memory for the source tags were strongly influenced by the a priori credibility of the messages: Statements with a low a priori credibility were more likely to be (mis)attributed to advertising than statements with high a priori credibility. These findings suggest that the mere labeling of untrustworthy sources is of limited use because source information is quickly forgotten and memory-based source attributions are strongly biased by schematic influences.
Highlights
The internet has greatly lowered barriers for publishing, disseminating, and accessing information
A priori credibility interacted with the source, F(1,121) = 12.93, p < .01, ηp2 = .10, reflecting the fact that source had a stronger influence on statements with high a priori credibility than on statements that were not credible from the outset
This may reflect forgetting of the source labels, but note that the credibility ratings likely reflect the joint influence of different types of processes such as item recognition, source memory, and source guessing, so that it is necessary to disentangle these processes via cognitive modeling before drawing conclusions about them
Summary
The internet has greatly lowered barriers for publishing, disseminating, and accessing information. We are exposed to large quantities of information every day. Some of this information stems from trustworthy sources such as independent and unbiased news agencies or research institutes, but other information comes from partial and biased sources. Biased sources may provide misleading information to influence the recipients in the service of certain agendas. In the long term these source tags can only be effective when people remember them (Nadarevic & Erdfelder, 2019). This is an exercise in source memory because people do have to remember the message and its source. We examine how well the tagging of an untrustworthy source is remembered as such using the labeling of advertisements as an example
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