A Pilot Study For Experimental Manipulations of Author Expertise and Quality of Evidence in Research Summaries

In previous studies, Rosman & Grösser (2024) demonstrated that the quality of evidence in short descriptions of scientific studies interacted with trust in science to influence belief updating and that the positive relationship between trust in science and subjective ratings of quality of evidence is higher for studies with high quality of evidence. Additionally, a recent study by Jonas and Rosman (2024) extended findings originally related to the scientificness effect (Bromme et al., 2015; Thomm & Bromme, 2012) to an author level and suggested that a higher author scientificness encourages higher ratings of author expertise, integrity and benevolence among laypeople. Based on this research, a follow-up project aims to investigate main and interaction effects of the influence of author expertise and evidence quality on belief updating. The present pilot study will test new experimental materials for the manipulation of author expertise and evidence quality. To this end, an online experiment with a German general population sample recruited via a panel provider will be carried out. A 2*4 and a 3*4 between-subject ANOVA design will be employed to test for differences in laypeople’s evaluations of author scientificness and evidence quality. The analysis of the experimental results will enable inferences about the validity of the experimental manipulations and a possible revision of experimental materials.