Trust issues: Adolescents' epistemic vigilance towards online sources.

ABSTRACT: Development of epistemic vigilance towards online information is crucial for adolescents in the context of widespread online 'information pollution'. Children have demonstrated selective mistrust of webpages with typographical but not semantic errors. We used a selective trust task to investigate whether this pattern changes through adolescence. Participants read two pairs of sources about scientific topics, each pair containing a webpage with either semantic or typographical errors. When asked novel factual questions, which source participants drew answers from indicates the degree of selective trust in the source. As anticipated, age group significantly predicted selective trust scores, with older adolescents (N = 222, 16-20 years, M = 18 years) receiving higher scores than younger adole

SUBMITTER: Brown P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12351225 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature