Abstract
Digital media has become a part of daily life and a means of support for various situations. In this context, the market for apps that deliver counselling and mental health content is growing rapidly, promising accessible solutions for psychological issues. However, the major benefit of digital counselling programs, namely easy access to potentially valuable information and advice, comes at a cost: information overload. Consequently, such overload means that people need to make trust judgments. In particular, whenever laypeople are confronted with questions regarding specialized knowledge and potentially conflicting claims, they have to decide which source to trust; this decision is made even more difficult by easy online access to a vast variety of advice. Based on the current literature on trust in scientific information and digital programs, we propose how laypeople can respond to trust-related challenges, and we take parenting apps as a test case to see what information in the context of online counselling enables users to make informed trust judgments and decisions.
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Strehlke, E., Bromme, R., Scholz, S., Kärtner, J. (2021). When Play Store Knows How to Deal with Your Kid: Trust in Digital Counselling. In: Blöbaum, B. (eds) Trust and Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72945-5_11
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