2018 Summer Symposium
Trust and credibility are two critical heuristics that the public uses to interpret, evaluate and make decisions about complex, uncertain and controversial scientific information (Brossard and Nisbet, 2007; Pornpitakpan, 2004). Previous scholars have defined credibility as a multi-item construct that emerges from some combination of the audience’s perceptions of the source’s “trustworthiness” (character, honesty, believability) (McCroskey & Teven, 1999), “expertise” (qualifications, intelligence, authority, knowledge), and “goodwill” (caring, responsiveness, concern, empathy) (Teven, 2008). Though previous studies have described the importance of trust and credibility across several contexts, knowledge about these topics is widely dispersed across multiple fields, each with different definitions, measures and theoretical frameworks (National Academies of Sciences, 2016).
Submission deadline: **January 29, 2018**