Language, Truth

The primary objective of this experiment is to examine whether the linguistic framing of true and false claims generalizes to evaluations of source trustworthiness. Design. The experiment will employ a within-subject design in which participants are exposed to two distinct news sources that differ in how they linguistically frame true and false claims. Each source will present six reports: three true and three false. Critically, the mapping between truth status and linguistic framing will differ across sources. For one source, true claims will be presented explicitly and false claims implicitly. For the other source, true claims will be presented implicitly and false claims explicitly. Thus, framing is manipulated at the source level, whereas truth status varies within source. Participants will read a series of short, Twitter-style news reports. After each report, they will rate the perceived truthfulness of the specific claim. After completing all six reports from a given source, participants will rate the overall trustworthiness of that source before proceeding to the second source. We hypothesize that implicit framing will increase perceived credibility of false claims and decrease perceived credibility of true claims, relative to explicit framing. Importantly, these item-level effects are expected to generalize to source-level evaluations: a source that presents true information explicitly and false information implicitly should be perceived as more trustworthy overall