Abstract
Understanding how humans evaluate credibility is an important scientific question in the era of fake news. Source credibility is among the most important aspects of credibility evaluations. One of the most direct ways to understand source credibility is to use measurements of brain activity of humans performing credibility evaluations. Nevertheless, source credibility has never been investigated using such a method before. This article reports the results of an experiment during which we have measured brain activity during source credibility evaluation, using EEG. The experiment allowed for identification of brain areas that were active when a participant made positive or negative source credibility evaluations. Based on experimental data, we modeled and predicted human source credibility evaluations using EEG brain activity measurements with F1 score exceeding 0.7 (using 10-fold cross-validation).
Highlights
In 2020, the world has been fighting a pandemic, but more precisely—both a pandemic and an infodemic1
We describe the results of a large experiment that aimed at understanding basic processes occurring in brain during credibility evaluation, by directly measuring brain activity
We start with hypothesis 1 that concerns the impact of the Source Credibility Level (SCL) on participants’ trusting or distrusting decisions
Summary
In 2020, the world has been fighting a pandemic, but more precisely—both a pandemic and an infodemic. One of the most striking examples is fake news that links COVID-19 epidemic to 5G technology. Fake news has continued to spread through social media (such as Facebook or Twitter) (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017). One of the main reasons is that messages on social media are forwarded based on trust that receivers have in their virtual friends (or trust that followers have in their Twitter sources). This makes it especially important to understand why social media users find messages from their virtual acquaintances so credible
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