Credibility Of Claims Research Articles

Bayesian approaches to designing replication studies.

Replication studies are essential for assessing the credibility of claims from original studies. A critical aspect of designing replication studies is determining their sample size; a too-small sample size may lead to inconclusive studies whereas a too-large sample size may waste resources that could be allocated better in other studies. Here, we show how Bayesian approaches can be used for tackling this problem. The Bayesian framework allows researchers to combine the original data and external knowledge in a design prior distribution for the underlying parameters. Based on a design prior, predictions about the replication data can be made, and the replication sample size can be chosen to ensure a sufficiently high probability of replication success. Replication success may be defined by Bayesian or non-Bayesian criteria and different criteria may also be combined to meet distinct stakeholders and enable conclusive inferences based on multiple analysis approaches. We investigate sample size determination in the normal-normal hierarchical model where analytical results are available and traditional sample size determination is a special case where the uncertainty on parameter values is not accounted for. We use data from a multisite replication project of social-behavioral experiments to illustrate how Bayesian approaches can help design informative and cost-effective replication studies. Our methods can be used through the R package BayesRepDesign. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Modern slavery and the accounting profession

This first paper in the Special Issue on “Modern slavery and the accounting profession” considers how various branches and functions of the accounting profession in business operations and supply chains are implicated by the move to end modern slavery. Accounting has always been involved with slavery practices. When slavery was legal, accounting focused on reporting slaves as assets and expenses in the accounts. In these more humane times, now that ownership of slaves is illegal, the accounting profession has different functional responsibilities towards modern slavery. These include external reporting in line with and above and beyond requirements of legislation; internal management accounting to build awareness and support planning, control and decision making to reduce modern slavery risk and look for opportunities from mitigation; and audit and assurance to ensure credibility of claims made by business. The papers presented in this Special Issue touch upon some of the key aspects of the connection between modern slavery and management control systems, corporate disclosures and the historical role of professional auditors/the accounting profession, but much remains to be achieved in the research agenda ahead.

Listing product benefits on an extra affixed label: effects on claim credibility and product evaluation

PurposeTo heighten shopper interest, fast moving consumer goods marketers often attach supplementary labels to the package front to promote product benefits. This study aims to use claim credibility as the foundation for investigating how an extra affixed label that addresses product benefits impacts consumer evaluation, as well as identifying important factors that might moderate the resulting responses.Design/methodology/approachThree between-subjects experiments examine how claim credibility mediates the influence of extra affixed labels on product evaluation (Study 1). They also test whether the impact on consumer responses of extra affixed labels, with emphasis on the same vs different benefits as those printed on the front of a package (Study 2.1) or with a high or low relevance between their claimed benefits and the front-of-package stated ingredients (Study 2.2), is dependent upon individuals’ need for cognition.FindingsResults show the power of extra affixed labels in improving product evaluation. Claim credibility mediated the observed effects of extra affixed labeling. Yet, the favorable effects of extra affixed labels for individuals high in need for cognition is diminished when expressed in a different (vs same) claim from those printed on the package front or the claim about product benefits is low (vs high) relevance to the declared ingredients. The reverse holds true for those low in need for cognition.Originality/valueThis study advances knowledge on the effects of extra affixed label claims on product evaluation.

Causal Strands for Social Bonds—A Case Study on the Credibility of Claims from Impact Reporting

The study investigates if causal claims based on a theory-of-change approach for impact reporting are credible. The authors use their most recent impact report for a Social Bond to show how theory-based logic models can be used to map the sustainability claims of issuers to quantifiable indicators. A single project family (homeownership loans) is then used as a case study to test the underlying hypotheses of the sustainability claims. By applying Bayes Theorem, evidence for and against the claims is weighted to calculate the degree to which the belief in the claims is warranted. The authors found that only one out of three claims describe a probable cause–effect chain for social benefits from the loans. The other two claims either require more primary data to be corroborated or should be re-defined to link the intervention more closely and robustly with the overarching societal goals. However, all previous reported indicators are below the thresholds of the most conservative estimates for fractions of beneficiaries in the paper at hand. We conclude that the combination of a Theory-of-Change with a Bayesian Analysis is an effective way to test the plausibility of sustainability claims and to mitigate biases. Nevertheless, the method is—in the presented form—also too elaborate and time-consuming for impact reporting in the sustainable finance market.

Pride and Prejudice and Country-of-Origin Ecological Images: The Influence of COO Ecological Image on Consumer Evaluation of Product Greenness and Green Claim Credibility

ABSTRACT The increasing consumer demand for shopping eco-friendly products online leads brands and marketers to offer more products that are claimed to be eco-friendly on online stores. However, it is very difficult for consumers to evaluate the credibility of such claims, and marketers usually do not offer resources to help consumers make the evaluation. Hence, consumers must utilize limited information cues (e.g. country-of-origin, price, etc.) that are available to them to evaluate the credibility of green claims and the greenness of products. Two online experiments were conducted to examine how product COO, product price, and product types affect consumer perception of product greenness and green claim credibility. The findings suggest that product COO is a powerful factor that influences consumer perception. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed.

Clean labeling: Is it about the presence of benefits or the absence of detriments? Consumer response to personal care claims

The personal care industry is gradually shifting its promises toward health and environment-based messages, promoting either the addition of beneficial ingredients or processes or the removal of potentially deleterious additives or procedures. However, prior research has failed to encapsulate and organize the plethora of claims and to link consumer concerns, knowledge, and the influence of prosocial norms to attitude and purchase intention. This study examines the impact of absence- and presence-framed claims referring either to health or environmental friendliness on attitude and behavioral intention toward personal care products. It also explores differences in consumer profiles (concerning health, the environment, appearance, peer pressure, or disparate levels of front-of-package literacy). Using a framework based on Ajzen (1985) theory of planned behavior enriched with variables such as personal altruistic and egoistic concerns, claim credibility, and attitude, this study shows the superiority of absence-versus presence-framed claims for health and environment-based messages. Both claims pertaining to the environment and to health generate a positive attitude and are powerful in further converting it into buying intention.

Recruitment brand equity for unknown employers: Examining the effects of recruitment message claim verifiability and credibility on job pursuit intentions

AbstractPrior research on recruitment and employer brand equity has primarily drawn on the cognitive psychology perspective from the marketing brand equity literature to examine how recruitment practices and job seekers' perceptions of employer brand image impact recruitment outcomes. This perspective, however, provides little guidance for how unknown organizations can use recruitment messages to influence job seekers. Our study draws from research on the search‐experience framework, which uses an information economics approach to brand equity, to identify how recruitment claims from companies with no employer brand image shape job seekers' job pursuit intentions. Results based on a within‐subjects study with 197 participants showed that job seekers perceive differences in claim verifiability depending on the job or company attribute in the message. Further, we found that job seekers' perceptions of recruitment claim verifiability are indirectly related to intentions to pursue the recruiting organization through perceived claim credibility. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

What can we know about the future? Epistemology and the credibility of claims about the world ahead

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine whether the results of futures studies are knowledge or if not, what it is that futures studies actually produce. Five types of representations of the future are the result of these studies. As the value of futures studies depends on no small measure of their credibility, the standards for carrying out and reporting these studies are identified along with a description of how Toulmin’s model of informal logic can be used to best improve their credibility.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on a multi-disciplinary literature review and integrative analysis.FindingsUsing epistemological criteria for knowledge as truth, belief and rationale, the results of futures studies are not and cannot be knowledge. Instead, futures studies produce five kinds of “representations of the future”: predictions, projections and forecasts, scenarios, visions and structures for action. Six standards for conducting and reporting the results of futures studies are provided which will increase the credibility of these studies. Toulmin’s informal logic format will provide the foundation for the most persuasive basis of such studies.Practical implicationsFuturists will understand that the products of their studies are not knowledge and why this is the case. They will also understand that the type of futures studies they are conducting are either conditional, contingent propositions or normative prescriptions in nature. There are six guidelines for carrying out and reporting futures studies which can also be used to assess the quality of published studies. They will see how the use of a certain kind of informal logic can establish the most credible foundations for their studies.Originality/valueAs an integrative literature review, it incorporates and simplifies widely disparate existing contributions to the topic of the nature of knowledge regarding futures studies and the criteria for making such studies as credible as possible.

Theme-Relevant Truth Discovery on Twitter: An Estimation Theoretic Approach

Twitter has emerged as a new application paradigm of sensing the physical environment by using human as sensors. These human sensed observations are often viewed as binary claims (either true or false). A fundamental challenge on Twitter is how to ascertain the credibility of claims and the reliability of sources without the prior knowledge on either of them beforehand. This challenge is referred to as truth discovery. An important limitation exists in the current Twitter-based truth discovery solutions: they did not explore the theme relevance aspect of claims and the correct claims identified by their solutions can be completely irrelevant to the theme of interests. In this paper, we present a new analytical model that explicitly considers the theme relevance feature of claims in the solutions of truth discovery problem on Twitter. The new model solves a bi-dimensional estimation problem to jointly estimate the correctness and theme relevance of claims as well as the reliability and theme awareness of sources. The new model is compared with the discovery solutions in current literature using three real world datasets collected from Twitter during recent disastrous and emergent events: Paris attack, Oregon shooting, and Baltimore riots, all in 2015. The new model was shown to be effective in terms of finding both correct and relevant claims.

Critical Digital Literacy: EFL Students’ Ability to Evaluate Online Sources

The advancement of Internet-based technologies and the new media ecology have contributed to the increased reliance on online sources in both the academic and the non-academic contexts. This study investigated how students evaluated the credibility of online information and the bias that might have influenced the content of the information. 152 EFL students responded to the online critical literacy assessment, which consisted of six tasks: evaluating the credibility of visual information, evaluating WhatsApp message, comparing and evaluating websites, distinguishing between news and sponsored content, evaluating the credibility of claim in a YouTube video, and evaluating an Instagram post. The results of the study showed that the students were easily deceived by the online information they read from various online media. They particularly struggled to detect the unsubstantiated claims from the YouTube video. Despite being a generation Z who frequently used social media and various online sources in their daily lives, the students could not critically evaluate the claims posted on these platforms. Implications of this study include the need to incorporate critical digital literacy in the language skill courses and deliberate exposure to strategies in evaluating online sources.

Heuristic Thinking and Credibility of Organic Advertising Claims: The Role of Knowledge and Motivations

Consumers are often overexposed to sustainability symbols and claims on food product packages and find it difficult to accurately judge their meaning when making purchase decisions. Based on the heuristic-systematic model (HSM), this paper aims to identify cognitive mechanisms to reduce the heuristic credibility of organic advertising claims and to increase the motivation for searching for more reliable information when making product judgements. Particularly, we hypothesize that knowledge and defense and accuracy motivations affect organic claim credibility, which in turn is related to organic product judgement. Data collected from an experimental between-subject study with a sample of 412 Spanish undergraduates was analyzed using partial least squares. The results indicated that claim credibility was directly related to the attribution of organic properties to products, and was affected by defense motivation especially when appropriate knowledge was not available. Improving consumers’ knowledge reduced organic claim credibility and triggered a positive effect of accuracy motivation on credibility. The findings stress the importance of improving the regulation of ambitious advertising claims and developing specific educational campaigns to empower consumers and prevent biased purchase decisions of organic products.

The COVID-19 Conundrum

The COVID-19 Conundrum

The influence of perceived credibility on purchase intention via competence and authenticity

Abstract Due to the significant role of authenticity in the restaurant business, restaurateurs proactively make authenticity claims. However, the literature has rarely examined whether customers view these claims as credible and how the credibility of these claims influences dining intention. Thus, this study examines customers’ perceived credibility of authenticity claims based on the authenticator claiming authenticity, restaurant ownership type, and restaurant history. Furthermore, utilizing trust-transfer theory, this study proposes and tests a model that links customers’ perceived credibility of a restaurant’s authenticity claims, perceived restaurant competence, perceived restaurant authenticity, and purchase intention. The results show that the authenticator of authenticity claims and restaurant ownership type influence the perceived credibility of authenticity claims. Additionally, the perceived credibility of authenticity claims influences customers’ dining intention indirectly through restaurant competence and constructed authenticity.

OF BOUNDARIES, PLACES, AND SITUATIONS

ABSTRACTThomas F. Gieryn's Truth‐Spots: How Places Make Us Believe presents eight case studies to support his historical‐sociological thesis that “Places … have agency and exert a force of their own on the direction and pace of knowledge and belief” (18). Gieryn adds a new angle to a century‐old discourse on the social construction of truth: the emplacement of credibility in narrated material locations. Throughout his career, Gieryn has contributed extensively to the spatial and placeful analysis of knowledge and social power: from advancing the concept of discursive “boundary‐work” in the 1980s, to a refined method of “cultural cartography” in the 1990s, and in the twenty‐first century, toward investigations of places: defined as meaning‐enriched material locations. He has now advanced “truth‐spots” as a type of place that credibilizes truth‐claims. This essay reviews the key concepts in the career of this historical sociologist of scientific knowledge, through a mapping of Gieryn's own trajectory within the arc of a long pragmatist tradition in US social science. I shall use Gieryn's own case studies to test two key claims in his account of how place operates in the social‐cultural construction of belief: (1) The model of “place” that Gieryn proposed in 2000, and has used consistently ever since (termed here a “Gieryn‐place”), and (2) Gieryn's claim that features of “truth‐spots” exhibit an observably independent (“agentic”) effect on the credibility of claims made there. I argue that both Gieryn‐places and truth‐spots suffer from incomplete specification of the ways in which people attach meanings to locations; of the boundaries of places; and of the sites of conscious encounter with places. They suffer also from his own boundary‐work to exclude imaginary, cultural, and virtual spaces from his conception of place. This essay argues that a credible account of how place operates in/as history will require a focus on situation and situatedness, drawing on the pragmatist tradition of the Thomas Theorem. The concept of situation completes the circuit between meaning‐production and the attachment of meaning to places and opens a gate for historical investigation, across the boundary between imagined, virtual, and conceptual spaces, and lived, material embodied places.

Rating news claims: Feature selection and evaluation.

News claims that travel the Internet and online social networks (OSNs) originate from different, sometimes unknown sources, which raises issues related to the credibility of those claims and the drivers behind them. Fact-checking websites such as Snopes, FactCheck, and Emergent use human evaluators to investigate and label news claims, but the process is labor- and time-intensive. Driven by the need to use data analytics and algorithms in assessing the credibility of news claims, we focus on what can be generalized about evaluating human-labeled claims. We developed tools to extract claims from Snopes and Emergent and used public datasets collected by and published on those websites. Claims extracted from those datasets were supervised or labeled with different claim ratings. We focus on claims with definite ratings-false, mostly false, true, and mostly true, with the goal of identifying distinctive features that can be used to distinguish true from false claims. Ultimately, those features can be used to predict future unsupervised or unlabeled claims. We evaluate different methods to extract features as well as different sets of features and their ability to predict the correct claim label. By far, we noticed that OSN websites report high rates of false claims in comparison with most of the other website categories. The rate of reported false claims is higher than the rate of true claims in fact-checking websites in most categories. At the content-analysis level, false claims tend to have more negative tones in sentiments and hence can provide supporting features to predict claim classification.

Attacking science on social media: How user comments affect perceived trustworthiness and credibility.

The science on controversial topics is often heatedly discussed on social media, a potential problem for social-media-based science communicators. Therefore, two exploratory studies were performed to investigate the effects of science-critical user comments attacking Facebook posts containing scientific claims. The claims were about one of four controversial topics (homeopathy, genetically modified organisms, refugee crime, and childhood vaccinations). The user comments attacked the claims based on the thematic complexity, the employed research methods, the expertise, or the motivations of the researchers. The results reveal that prior attitudes determine judgments about the user comments, the attacked claims, and the source of the claim. After controlling for attitude, people agree most with thematic complexity comments, but the comments differ in their effect on perceived claim credibility only when the comments are made by experts. In addition, comments attacking researchers’ motivations were more effective in lowering perceived integrity while scientists’ perceived expertise remained unaffected.

Credibility without legitimacy? Informal development in the highly regulated context of the United Kingdom

As the first contribution in this Special Issue's section on “informality in developed contexts”, this paper explores notions of legality, legitimacy and credibility in the United Kingdom (UK). By drawing on credibility theory, the paper analyses two examples of informal development, the ‘Plotlands’ and Low Impact Development (LID); historic and contemporary respectively, the paper demonstrates that even within a context of extensive government control and relatively well funded state planning apparatus, informal development occurs. Moreover, even here, this informal development can carry credibility, problematizing notions of legitimacy because they are outside of the state sanctioned boundaries of acceptable development. This in turn raises questions about the ways in which the state defines and polices what it considers legitimate development. Not only can both Plotlands and LID claim credibility through their temporal and spatial persistence- through their function not form- they can make claims about the value of the way of life they are promoting. Both examples actively articulate ideas of self-reliance and sufficiency against discourses of urbanisation and the centralisation of regulation and control of land use. In so doing, they challenge the assumed universal legitimacy of a benevolent state and its power to render such developments and lifestyles illegitimate.

On Scalable and Robust Truth Discovery in Big Data Social Media Sensing Applications

Identifying trustworthy information in the presence of noisy data contributed by numerous unvetted sources from online social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) has been a crucial task in the era of big data. This task, referred to as truth discovery, targets at identifying the reliability of the sources and the truthfulness of claims they make without knowing either a priori. In this work, we identified three important challenges that have not been well addressed in the current truth discovery literature. The first one is “misinformation spread” where a significant number of sources are contributing to false claims, making the identification of truthful claims difficult. For example, on Twitter, rumors, scams, and influence bots are common examples of sources colluding, either intentionally or unintentionally, to spread misinformation and obscure the truth. The second challenge is “data sparsity” or the “long-tail phenomenon” where a majority of sources only contribute a small number of claims, providing insufficient evidence to determine those sources’ trustworthiness. For example, in the Twitter datasets that we collected during real-world events, more than 90 percent of sources only contributed to a single claim. Third, many current solutions are not scalable to large-scale social sensing events because of the centralized nature of their truth discovery algorithms. In this paper, we develop a Scalable and Robust Truth Discovery (SRTD) scheme to address the above three challenges. In particular, the SRTD scheme jointly quantifies both the reliability of sources and the credibility of claims using a principled approach. We further develop a distributed framework to implement the proposed truth discovery scheme using Work Queue in an HTCondor system. The evaluation results on three real-world datasets show that the SRTD scheme significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art truth discovery methods in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

A Tale of Two Templa

The Portuguese sailor and trader Mendes Pinto, later a companion of the Jesuit Francis Xavier, claimed to have “discovered” Japan in 1542.1 Although he had an expedient personality, his description of Japan and the South China Sea trade is strikingly accurate and gives his claim credibility. Even if he was not the very first European to tread Japanese soil, he was undoubtedly “one of the earliest Portuguese travelers to that country, which he visited three or four times between 1544 and 1556.” This potentially earliest European voyager to Japan was an associate of Francis Xavier both before and during the Jesuit leader’s early missionary efforts in Japan, a fact that that prolific member of the Society of Jesus’ own reliable correspondence corroborates. Pinto indeed helped to finance one of the first Jesuit churches in Japan in 1551 and seems to have taken the Society’s Exercises and become a Jesuit himself in 1554.2 European trade, exploration, and missionary activity in the South China Sea were demonstrably intertwined during the mid- and late-1540s. The Jesuits were thus at the forefront of intercultural interaction between Reformation Europe and warring states-period Japan.

First-order Claims: Representing Blacks within Health Care Policies in Brazil

ABSTRACTOne of the most influential and radical constructivist proposals within the recent turn to theories of representation is to recast representation as a claim, emphasising its dynamic, ubiquitous, performative and unstable nature. Such a depiction seems to render representation a highly contingent and evanescent phenomenon, though the desire to succeed leads claim-makers to seek credibility and remain attentive to context. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it sheds light on cases where the constraining of ‘context’ is not exogenous, as both the audiences’ criteria for judging claims and the discursive repertoire of social movements are constructed by and through processes of discursive negotiation. The article proposes to distinguish first-order and second-order claims to shed light on the endogenous relation between context and the credibility of claims. During long-term processes of discursive negotiation, the former succeed in defining as givens the moral and factual value of representative claims, granting credibility to the latter. Second, it shows how slow and piecemeal the construction of first-order claims is by looking at the case of the black feminist movement’s representative claims and influence within healthcare policies in Brazil. Making claims for specific policies on racial grounds was an extremely difficult task for these movements, as such claims were at odds with the progressive, universalistic framework used by public health professionals. In addition, a discursive repertoire did not even exist within the black movement to make claims within the field of health. Mobilisation by black feminist women over a thirty-year period was crucial to both placing health at the centre of the black movement’s agenda, and to growing recognition within Brazilian health policies of the importance of race.