Abstract
This paper discusses to what extent the browsing context needs to be taken into account when considering web credibility ratings. We focus on the availability of other websites on the same topic and the browsing purpose as two factors that can potentially influence how people perceive credibility and how accurate their judgments are when contrasted with expert evaluations. We analyze data from an experimental study in which subjects were asked to rate a set of websites on various dimensions in different contexts. We conclude that more context influences how often extreme evaluations are used, which ratings correlate with the declared knowledge of the topic, and which websites features are brought up as important for formulating the final judgment.
Keywords
- Web credibility
- Subjectivity
- Judgment context-dependence
- Credibility experiment
- Reliability
- World wide web
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Notes
- 1.
Websites on two additional topics were added in this condition: orthodontia and vitamin B17 in the context of cancer treatment. Ratings for these websites are not included in the following analyses to ensure comparability across conditions.
- 2.
For this test the two lowest ratings were grouped together to ensure reliability.
References
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Wawer, A., Nielek, R., Wierzbicki, A.: Predicting webpage credibility using linguistic features. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 1135–1140. ACM, April, 2014
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Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by Polish National Science Centre grant 2015/19/B/ST6/03179.
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Abramczuk, K., Kąkol, M., Nielek, R., Biele, C. (2019). Is Truth Contextual? The Browsing Purpose, the Availability of Comparable Material, and the Web Content Credibility Evaluation. In: Ahram, T., Karwowski, W., Taiar, R. (eds) Human Systems Engineering and Design. IHSED 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 876. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02053-8_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02053-8_17
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