Putnam Adam L, Phelps Riley J
Carleton College, United States.
Carleton College, United States.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2017 Sep;179:114-123. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.07.010. Epub 2017 Aug 4.
Authors use in-text citations to provide support for their claims and to acknowledge work done by others. How much do such citations increase the believability of an author's claims? It is possible that readers (especially novices) might ignore citations as they read. Alternatively, citations ostensibly serve as evidence for a claim, which justifies using them as a basis for a judgment of truth. In six experiments, subjects saw true and false trivia claims of varying difficulty presented with and without in-text citations (e.g., The cat is the only pet not mentioned in the bible) and rated the likelihood that each statement was true. A mini meta-analysis summarizing the results of all six experiments indicated that citations had a small but reliable effect on judgments of truth (d=0.13, 95% CI [0.06, 0.20]) suggesting that subjects were more likely to believe claims that were presented with citations than without. We discuss this citation effect and how it is similar and different to related research suggesting that nonprobative photos can increase judgments of truth.
作者使用文内引用为其主张提供支持，并认可他人的研究成果。此类引用在多大程度上能提高作者主张的可信度呢？读者（尤其是新手）在阅读时有可能会忽略这些引用。或者，引用表面上可作为一项主张的证据，这使得将其用作判断真伪的依据具有合理性。在六项实验中，受试者会看到有和没有文内引用的、难度各异的真假琐事陈述（例如，猫是《圣经》中唯一未提及的宠物），并对每条陈述为真的可能性进行评分。一项总结所有六项实验结果的小型元分析表明，引用对真伪判断有微小但可靠的影响（d = 0.13，95%置信区间[0.06, 0.20]），这表明受试者更有可能相信有引用的陈述，而非没有引用的陈述。我们将讨论这种引用效应，以及它与相关研究的异同，相关研究表明无证明力的照片也能提高对真实性的判断。
