Credibility
Credibility. Evaluate claims and their sources Identify interested parties Credibility in media and advertising. Why is Credibility Important?. People are easy to manipulate because they allow emotions and desires to cloud their thinking.
Credibility
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Presentation Transcript
Credibility Evaluate claims and their sources Identify interested parties Credibility in media and advertising
Why is Credibility Important? • People are easy to manipulate because they allow emotions and desires to cloud their thinking. • We often assume someone is credible based on irrelevant factors like their appearance, when people out to trick us have certainly thought about the effect of their appearance! • ‘Interested Parties’ have something to gain by our belief in a claim and will use psychological techniques, for example, in advertising.
Evaluate Credibility • We evaluate credibility of both the claim and its source. • Claim: does the claim conflict with our own observations or background information? • Source: Is the source an interested party (something who will gain by my belief in a claim)? Does the source have relevant expertise?
Common Mistakes in Evaluating Claims/Sources • Claims: we may be willing to uncritically accept a claim because we want it to be true • Sources: Rather than look for genuine expertise in an area, we judge the credibility of a source on irrelevant things like: clothing (such as a nice suit, or a lab coat), an ‘honest face’, handshakes, etcetera.
Credibility in the Media • Some reasons for the bias/slant in the media: • (1) Consolidation of media ownership: as of 2004, 90% of all media was owned by 5 companies • (2) Government management of the news: the government has paid for ‘news reports’ that are really advertisements for their policies • (3) Some media sources are deliberately slanted to be very conservative or very liberal and are not unbiased
Advertising • Advertising creates interested parties, since the purpose of the advertisement is to get customers to buy the product. Thus they have a stake in our belief. • Three ways that advertisements work when they don’t give reasons for buying the product: • (1) they bring out feelings in us (heartwarming, etc) • (2) they depict people that we admire or think of ourselves as like using the product • (3) they depict the product being used in situations we would like to be in
