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This study explored relationships between Internet-specific justification beliefs and source evaluation and corroboration during Web search. Fifty university students completed the Internet-Specific Epistemic Justification Inventory (ISEJ), which targeted beliefs concerning the justification of Internet-based knowledge claims about natural science issues. Two to five days later, they conducted a Web search in order to communicate a justified position regarding an unsettled and unfamiliar socio-scientific issue. Using think-aloud and trace methodologies, participants’ source evaluation and corroboration behaviors were examined. Furthermore, the extent and relevance of their post-search written justifications for their recommendation about the controversial issue were analyzed. Results showed that beliefs in justification by authority positively predicted comments regarding source evaluation, the percentage of visited websites that were listed beyond the first three Google search results, and the likelihood of opening multiple browser tabs. Beliefs in personal justification negatively predicted comments regarding corroboration of information across websites and the number of relevant aspects included in the written justifications. Finally, participants with stronger beliefs in justification by multiple sources gave more extensive justifications for their recommendation and included more relevant aspects in those justifications.

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When reading scientific information on the Internet laypersons frequently encounter conflicting claims. However, they usually lack the ability to resolve these scientific conflicts based on their own prior knowledge. This study aims to investigate how differences in the trustworthiness and/or expertise of the sources putting forward the conflicting claims affect laypersons' explanation and resolution of the scientific conflict. We sequentially presented 144 participants with two conflicting scientific claims regarding the safety of nanoparticles in sunscreen and manipulated whether the scientists putting forward the claims differed in their trustworthiness and/or expertise. After having read the claims on a computer in a self-paced manner, participants rated their subjective explanations for the conflicting claims, assessed their personal claim agreement, and completed a source memory task. We examined how differences in source trustworthiness and source expertise affected these measures. Results showed that trustworthiness differences resulted in higher attribution of the conflict to motivational explanations, and expertise differences in higher attribution of the conflict to competence explanations, than without respective differences. Furthermore, main effects of trustworthiness differences and of expertise differences on readers' claim agreement were shown, with participants agreeing more with claims from sources of higher trustworthiness or expertise.

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