Dynamic source credibility and its impacts on knowledge revision

Corrections to readers’ misconceptions should result in higher belief when information sources are of high credibility. However, evaluations of credibility may be malleable, and we do not yet fully understand how changes to a source’s credibility influence readers’ credibility evaluations and knowledge revision outcomes. Thus, in two experiments, we examined how updating a source’s credibility (Experiment 1: initially neutral sources later updated to be high-, low-, or neutral-credibility sources; Experiment 2: initially high- or low-credibility sources later updated to be low- or high-credibility sources) influenced knowledge revision and source credibility evaluations after readers engaged with refutation and non-refutation texts. Results showed that readers revised their credibility judgments from neutral-, high-, and low-credibility initial evaluations, indicating that source judgments are malleable rather than fixed. In addition, refutations from sources that are later revealed to be of high credibility can facilitate revision of both knowledge and initial source credibility evaluations.