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Article In: Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

Speakers’ responsibility for evidential claims

Believe me, I saw it!

ORCiD logo with link | University of Neuchâtel | Sorbonne University
ORCiD logo with link | University of Neuchâtel
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Abstract
People are vigilant toward the risk of misinformation and assess speakers’ trustworthiness to calibrate their trust accordingly. This assessment can target speakers’ epistemic commitments, conveyed through evidential claims. Speakers may take responsibility for the truth of a proposition by reporting first-hand evidence (“I saw that p”) or defer responsibility by referring to second-hand evidence (“somebody told me that p”). This pre-registered study experimentally investigates whether trust calibration is sensitive to the accuracy of these evidential claims. Our findings show that when a speaker shared accurate information p but provided an inaccurate evidential claim, the negative impact on perceived trustworthiness was greater for the strong perceptual evidential claim than the weak hearsay claim. These results provide new evidence that overcommitting by claiming direct visual evidence for information acquired second-hand is more reputationally damaging than appealing to hearsay despite having direct evidence. We discuss the implications for designing more trustworthy artificial agents.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Evaluation of speakers’ epistemic commitments
    • 1.2Speakers’ evidential claims as commitment signals
    • 1.3The accountability for speakers’ evidential claims
  • 2.Experiment
    • 2.1Method
      • 2.1.1Participants
      • 2.1.2Materials and design
    • 2.2Results
  • 3.Discussion
    • 3.1Limitations and future directions
    • 3.2Implications for artificial agents
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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