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Robert Peace
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Year 4 Student – 2019 Intake – Cohort 1 My project takes a systems/socio-technical approach to improving users' resilience against disinformation. Specifically, researching the affect of online trust and identity has on how users seek information online. |
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PhD Project |
Investigating the Perceived Trustworthiness of Digital Information I am a Psychologist with a broad interest in trust, deception detection and communications. I am a mixed methods researcher with experience in both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. I earned a BSc in Psychology, receiving the British Psychological Society's Welsh Branch best final year dissertation award, and an MSc in Criminology and Cybersecurity. I am specifically interested in how individuals communicate, evaluate, and exploit the trustworthiness of digital information in online spaces. Trust is one of - if not the most - critical issue facing 21st-century information societies. Trust is central to modern, digital life. From how we shop (e-commerce) to how we form relationships and how we search for, select, and understand information, people need to make difficult decisions about whether to trust the online information they encounter. While the Internet has democratised access and sharing of information, it has also removed traditional gatekeepers and assurance methods that, in an offline world, tended to assure us of the trustworthiness of information. Moreover, the cues that people might use to judge the trustworthiness or credibility of an online information source are relatively easy to fake at a low cost, whilst the design of information systems often prioritises engagement over the promotion of trustworthy content. Consequently, individuals have a complex burden when attempting to evaluate the trustworthiness of online information. In this project, I investigated how individuals perceive the trustworthiness of digital information with a specific focus on the use of digital trust cues in the evaluation of ostensibly trustworthy online information. The theoretical contributions of the project are to advance and assess whether trust theory based on in-person interactions is appropriate to be applied in the digital world. Practical contributions include developing and validating a measurement tool to determine how trustworthy individuals perceive the trustworthiness of online information and the overall results potentially informing digital literacy interventions. Supervisors: Dr Laura G.E. Smith (Bath) and Professor Adam Joinson (Bath)
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