Postgraduate research opportunities Reasons to believe: how we decide which information to trust

Cognitive authority has been a long-standing reason to trust information – the person who has written the information is a trusted and reliable source of information based on their expertise. Affective authority is a more recent form of authority – that the person supplying the information is doing so in an empathetic and emotionally aligned way and therefore ‘understands’ the situation requiring information. Less investigated in information science is moral authority – that the person supplying information is seen as a trustworthy source of values and guidance on how to act in a principled way. Or what about charismatic authority, Weber’s concept by which people’s authority come from their personal charisma. This dissertation will consider these, and possibly other different notions of authority that can be applied to information and contrast them and their roles in deciding who and what to believe. There are many ways in which this could be investigated depending on your preference for research.