Source credibility

In the pre-digital world, citizens had access to a limited set of sources to learn about politics. The Internet has drastically changed the number and nature of sources. This has renewed scholarly interest in source credibility – a concept which has proven difficult to define and operationalize. This entry argues that source credibility, rather than a variable, should be understood as the research area concerned with the effect of sources on communicative outcomes. Typical outcomes studied include attitude change and, more recently, the processing of misinformation. Regarding source characteristics, source-receiver similarity, e.g., ideology closeness, is the factor most consistently found to affect political communication. There is little research – in the digital context – about the circumstances under which sources matter. In sum, source credibility is here to stay, both given the remaining theoretical and empirical challenges, but also developments such as artificial intelligence, which may entirely upend the meaning of “source”.