GoodWork Paper 45: Probing Trust on the Internet

Author(s): Lindsay Pettingill

Editor(s): Howard Gardner, Series Editor

Media: Paper

Description: I describe the conclusions of an online “Survey of Trust in Contemporary America” administered during the summer of 2005 to a largely liberal audience and during the winter of 2006 to a largely conservative audience. Results of both studies confirm earlier work (Gardner, 2004) that documented the decline in trust of traditional media sources and the rise of entertainers, as opposed to journalists, as trusted sources of information. The survey revealed diminished recourse to the media as sources of information; consistently high levels of trust in family members and close friends regardless of the issue; and the ubiquitous use of the Internet despite little trust across samples in the information found therein. A comparison of the two samples reveals differences in trust that may have implications for intervention. I suggest that conservatives and liberals may hold different mental models of trust. The results suggest three promising avenues of further research: 1) determining the strategies and criteria used to establish trustworthiness in both traditional and Internet media, 2) explicating the primacy of family and friends, 3) examining more closely the relationship between media literacy and trust decisions.