Trust issues: Adolescents' epistemic vigilance towards online sources

Abstract

Development of epistemic vigilance towards online information is crucial for adolescents in the context of widespread online ‘information pollution’. Children have demonstrated selective mistrust of webpages with typographical but not semantic errors. We used a selective trust task to investigate whether this pattern changes through adolescence. Participants read two pairs of sources about scientific topics, each pair containing a webpage with either semantic or typographical errors. When asked novel factual questions, which source participants drew answers from indicates the degree of selective trust in the source. As anticipated, age group significantly predicted selective trust scores, with older adolescents (N = 222, 16–20 years, M = 18 years) receiving higher scores than younger adolescents (N = 153, 11–16 years, M = 13.7 years.). While this age effect was present in both typographical and semantic conditions, it was particularly pronounced for semantic errors. Additionally, pre-exposure to an accuracy prompt was not a significant factor in selective trust scores, demonstrating some limitations in the utility of this prime for more complex selective trust decisions. We theorize that semantic errors may have more salience than typographical errors for older adolescents' selective trust decisions, whereas younger adolescents place more emphasis on a visual understanding of source credibility.