News Article Study

Study Materials

• Consent form (PDF): Form.pdf
• Study Software (~250 MB): Program.zip

Instructions

Open the Consent Form and read it. If you have any questions, you can ask them of the experimenter (Lara Hattatoglu). When you feel ready to proceed, give Lara your verbal consent.
Download the Study Software and unzip it. You will see a folder named "CredibilityRater". Inside it, you will find four items: CredibilityRater.exe, WobbrockLib.dll, Articles.csv, and a folder named "articles". These items all need to remain in the same directory together.
Close all other applications on your computer except your Web browser showing these instructions and, for remote sessions, the Zoom videoconferencing software.
You will double-click CredibilityRater.exe to run the study software full-screen. BUT before you do that, here is what to expect:

You will be presented with a series of news-like articles from a variety of sources, some more credible than others. Your job is to rate each article on how believable it seems to you. The articles will be presented to you very quickly, and you will not have time to read them. Instead, you will only be able to get a quick impression based on their visual appearance. If an article is taller than your screen can show, it will scroll for you automatically. Once an article has been presented, you will rate how believable it seemed on a 1-7 scale, with "1" being the least believable, and "7" being the most believable. Any advertisements that might have been present in the articles have been removed, so you might see some whitespace where ads once were. (You can just ignore those spaces.) You might also see some articles more than once—this is expected; just rate each article separately each time. You will be presented with 100 articles in all, and given a prompt to rest after every 20 articles. You should not need to use the mouse for this study; just rate each article using the number keys (1-7) on your keyboard. It will take you about 20 minutes to rate the 100 articles. Here is the 1-7 scale and prompt you will use:

After the study session finishes, you can type Ctrl+X to exit the software.
Lara Hattatoglu, the experimenter, will ask you a few brief follow-up questions about your experience during the study session. At that time, you can also ask Lara anything you like.
1. What did you notice most when making your article believability ratings?
2. Do you consume news? If so, how often?
3. What news source(s) do you typically consume?
4. On what platform(s) do you primarily get your news? Web? Mobile? Print? Television? Other?
5. What is your age?
6. What gender do you identify as (or prefer not to respond)?
7. What is/was/will be your academic major?
After the study, the directory with the study materials will contain a new XML file that was created from your session. Please attach that file to an email and send it to Lara Hattatoglu at larahat@uw.edu.
Once Lara receives your XML file, she will send you your Amazon gift card code for $15 USD.
Any questions before you begin?
When you're ready, go ahead and double-click CredibilityRater.exe. Once you do, you will see a settings dialog. All you need to enter is the Subject ID. Please enter the Subject ID that Lara gives you. Then click "OK".

.NET Framework Runtime

The study software requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8 Runtime. Your Windows computer almost certainly has it installed. But if you see something like the following...

...you might need to update it. Get the .NET Framework 4.8 Runtime.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported in part by the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public (https://www.cip.uw.edu/). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of any supporter.