The study “Easy to read, easy to judge: Assessing readability as a heuristic for credibility in news” by Jessica F. Sparks and T. Franklin Waddell from University of Florida looked at whether readability acts as a heuristic that helps news consumers make credibility judgments of news using an online experimental design.
Since the 1880s, when there were news that were written simply to serve immigrants, journalism has become more oriented towards the middle classes and has, as a consequence, become less audience-oriented and less readable. This study then contributes to the “readability problem”, a fairly studied phenomenon, but does so at an angle that is less studied – whether it affects credibility.
The method of the study was an online experiment with 253 participants in the sample. Their median age was 33 (range 20 to 72) and the sample skewed slightly (59,2%) towards male. 83% reported being White/Caucasian, 8.7% reported being Black/African American, 3.6% were Asian American, 2.4% were Hispanic/Latinx, 2% were American Indian/Alaskan Native and 0.4% selected the “other” category. They were, on the average, more highly educated than the population at large.
Two news stories, modified as being highly readable (shorter sentences and simpler words) and less readable (more complicated sentences and longer words) were used as stimuli. Appelman and Sundar’s (2016) credibility scale was used to gauge the credibility of the news stories.
The theory was that high readability would increase credibility. However, the study showed that readability probably is not a heuristic affecting the credibility of news items. Partisanship or ideological measures also had no effect, nor did the choice of media.
Thus, readability might not affect credibility, but an alternative explanation was posited that it might only do so when the readers have an intention to engage with the news item in some way. Although readability might affect comprehension, it seems that it does not affect credibility.
The article “Easy to read, easy to judge: Assessing readability as a heuristic for credibility in news” by Jessica F. Sparks and T. Franklin Waddell is in Newspaper Research Journal. (free abstract).
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