Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information

Background/Context The Internet has democratized access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis. Despite mounting attention to the problem of online misinformation and growing agreement that digital literacy efforts are important, prior research offers few concrete ideas about what skilled evaluations look like. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Our purpose in this study was to seek out those who are skilled in online evaluations in order to understand how their strategies and approaches to evaluating digital content might inform educational efforts. We sampled 45 experienced users of the Internet: 10 Ph.D. historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduates. Analysis focused on the strategies participants used to evaluate online information and arrive at judgments of credibility. Research Design In this expert/novice study, participants thought aloud as they evaluated live websites and searched for information on social and political issues such as bullying, minimum wage, and teacher tenure. We analyze and present findings from three of the tasks participants completed. Findings/Results Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names. They read vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its reliability. In contrast, fact checkers read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of the original site. Compared to the other groups, fact checkers arrived at more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time. Conclusions/Recommendations We draw on insights gleaned from the fact checkers’ practices to examine current curricular approaches to teaching web credibility as well as to suggest alternatives.

Developing a Web Credibility Evaluation Tool Using PROMETHEE Method

In recent years, the Internet has become an indispensable way for users to find information which is almost instantaneously available. However, the presence of information on different websites makes the user needs to pre-check the credibility of the selected websites. Most users find it difficult to assess website credibility in terms of its particular characteristics or factors. Accordingly, we proposed an automated evaluation tool which considers various factors to assess the credibility of different websites and rank them from the highest credibility score to the lowest in order to allow the user to select the most credible website. We used the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMOTHEE). The latter is one of the Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods (MCDM). It combines pairwise comparison and outranking methods in order to give more accurate and superior credibility scores due to its enrichment evaluations. For the proposed tool to be acceptable, we carried out a correlation analysis to determine the coefficient of correlation between human judges and the proposed tool. We found the coefficient of correlation rho is 0.943 which indicates that there is a strong correlation between the human judges’ ranking and the ranking given by the proposed website evaluation tool.

The Interplay of Aesthetics, Usability and Credibility in Mobile Website Design and the Effect of Gender

In human-computer interaction, aesthetics, usability and credibility are key factors in the design of a successful website. Specifically, aesthetics has been identified as one of the main drivers of web credibility. However, in the mobile domain, large-scale research, cutting across cultures and continents, which is key to the generalizability of findings, is scarce. To bridge this gap, we conducted a multicultural study among 526 participants from 5 continents: Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Europe. Using four systematically designed mobile websites, we investigated: (1) the interrelationships among aesthetics, usability and credibility; and (2) the moderating effect of gender. Our results, based on partial least square path modeling, reveal that: (1) perceived aesthetics is stronger than perceived usability in predicting the perceived credibility of mobile websites; and (2) gender moderates the effect of perceived aesthetics on perceived usability, with this effect being stronger for males than for females. Our findings underscore the need for designers to pay closer attention to aesthetics in designing successful mobile websites, as their visual appeal, irrespective of gender, enhances their perceived ease of use and credibility. These findings are noteworthy because, given the usability challenges posed by the relatively small-screen size of the mobile device, designers may be tempted to focus on designing easy-to-use websites only, while downplaying their visual appeal. Such a decision may adversely impact the overall credibility of their websites going by users’ first impression.