The ERMeCC Lunch Seminar will be resuming in 2021 with a first seminar taking place on Thursday 21st January 2021 from 12:00 to 13:00. This seminar will be on-line.
Whether you’d like to share your questions and comments or just listen in over lunch, please feel free to join the zoom meeting on January 21st. If you did not receive a zoom link yet, please contact us at ermecc@eshcc.eur.nl.
For this first seminar of the year, there will be two presentations on the EU-funded project Trustworthy, Reliable, and Engaging Science Communication Approaches (TRESCA). The goal of the TRESCA project is to systematically understand what drives public trust in science communication. Please feel free to bring your lunch and comments!
Cues of credibility in online videos: the role of signaling
David Wegmann (University of Copenhagen), Marina Tulin (ESHCC), Andreas Gregersen (University of Copenhagen)
The emergence of the internet has created communication environments in which traditional methods of credibility assessment do not work. The anonymity online allows fraudsters to avoid the consequences of their behavior by dropping the persona they have taken on to share false information. Credibility can be indicated by social computing mechanisms or the credentials of a traditional media-gatekeeper and similar trusted organizations. This study aims to describe how users assess the credibility of unknown providers of non-fiction content who cannot boast credibility indicators, yet frequently emerge and establish themselves in the online marketplace of attention. One hypothesis, based on evolutionary anthropology theory, is that users might interpret production effort as a credibility enhancing display. We tested a specific hypothesis, namely that users might use the costly signal of production-effort investment to gage the credibility of video creators. The results of an online survey (N = 360) that obtained measures of assessment of production effort and credibility related to five real-world online videos show a clear positive correlation between the two measures. The findings support the hypothesis that, in the absence of reputation, production effort can serve as a costly signal of credibility indicating the creator’s commitment to building a lasting online presence that depends on a good reputation and relationship to its users.
Title: Trust me, climate change is real! Video experiments on public trust in science communication.
Marina Tulin, Jay Lee, and Jason Pridmore (ESHCC)
Science communication increasingly occurs via digital media. Social media platforms, such as YouTube, have become popular channels among science communicators. Despite this, we know relatively little about how viewers perceive, trust, or judge, this type of science communication. In this study, we seek to investigate what drives perceived trustworthiness and reliability in online science communication videos. To this end, we conducted video experiments using a well-viewed science communication (climate change) video by the animation studio ‘Kurzgesagt-In a Nutshell’. The original video can be found here. Informed by influencing factors suggested by prior research, we manipulated key aspects of the video, namely the gender of the narrator, the narration tone (hopeful vs. pessimistic), relevance (e.g., address viewer directly) and scientific rigor (e.g., provide links to sources, communicate uncertainty). Based on the results, we provide best practice recommendations for producing effective science communication videos.
If you or someone you know would like to present their research, or if you have any questions about the seminar series, please feel free to contact Daniel Trottier (trottier@eshcc.eur.nl) or Laura Braden (Braden@eshcc.eur.nl).