When Sources Honestly Provide Their Biased Opinion: Bias as a Distinct Source Perception With Independent Effects on Credibility and Persuasion

Abstract

Anecdotally, attributions that others are biased pervade many domains. Yet, research examining the effects of perceptions of bias is sparse, possibly due to some prior researchers conflating bias with untrustworthiness. We sought to demonstrate that perceptions of bias and untrustworthiness are separable and have independent effects. The current work examines these differences in the persuasion domain, but this distinction has implications for other domains as well. Two experiments clarify the conceptual distinction between bias (skewed perception) and untrustworthiness (dishonesty) and three studies demonstrate that source bias can have a negative effect on persuasion and source credibility beyond any parallel effects of untrustworthiness, lack of expertise, and dislikability. The current work suggests that bias is an independent, but understudied source characteristic.

Influences of Position Justification on Perceived Bias: Immediate Effects and Carryover Across Persuasive Messages

“…Importantly, we predict that argument quality effects on perceived bias should occur controlling for perceptions of source untrustworthiness, inexpertise, or dislikeability, consistent with recent work demonstrating that bias is separable from these other perceptions (Wallace et al, 2020b). Of course, argument quality could additionally influence these other perceptions, especially expertise (Erb et al, 2007;Petty et al, 1981).…”

“…Yet, until recently, researchers have largely ignored source bias or treated it as conceptually equivalent to source untrustworthiness. Recent research has separated perceived bias from perceived untrustworthiness and other related perceptions (Wallace et al, 2020a(Wallace et al, , 2020b. Source bias refers to skewedness in the source's perception, which may stem from motivation to hold a particular position or slanted knowledge exposure.…”

“…Source bias can affect persuasion in manners that parallel and differ from perceived untrustworthiness and inexpertise (Wallace et al, 2020a(Wallace et al, , 2020b. For example, source credibility-the overall believability of the source-has been routinely conceptualized as the combination of expertise and trustworthiness (Cooper et al, 2016;Hovland et al, 1953).…”

“…For example, source credibility-the overall believability of the source-has been routinely conceptualized as the combination of expertise and trustworthiness (Cooper et al, 2016;Hovland et al, 1953). However, recent work illuminated that source bias also independently undermines source credibility, which ultimately impairs persuasion attempts (Wallace et al, 2020b). Furthermore, source bias can have different effects than untrustworthiness.…”

Building mental models from multiple texts: How readers construct coherence from inconsistent sources

“…Creating an interconnected representation of multiple sources and contents implies more than merely mentally coding or symbolizing this information—sources also require evaluation. Many features related to source evaluation have been extensively studied by psychologists in context of assessing the persuasiveness of a message (e.g., Wallace et al., 2020), our focus here, however, is limited to factors affecting the representation of texts and sources rather than the impact of these representations on changing pre‐existing attitudes. Let's consider the role of evaluation that can occur from a text processing perspective by revisiting the jungle fire example.…”