https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1505-9665
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ABSTRACT
The current registered report investigated the effects of source credibility in relation to one’s own worldviews (i.e. supernatural beliefs and belief in science) in a spiritual and scientific context. We asked people to rate the truthfulness of ambiguous auditory statements about the cosmos attributed to a scientist or a spiritual guru and analyzed this using hierarchical Bayesian modeling. In line with our hypotheses, we found that the scientist was seen as more credible than the spiritual guru. The overall credibility of the statements was positively related to supernatural beliefs. These beliefs also interacted with the source of the statement, which was reflected in a tendency for supernatural believers to rate statements from both the scientist and the guru as credible. In contrast, with increasing belief in science, the credibility of the sources diverged with higher ratings for the scientist compared to the guru. The study involved a conceptual replication of previous research and increased the confidence in the robustness of source credibility effects and their interaction with people’s worldviews.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here
Notes
1. The subscripts on the Bayes factor refer to the hypotheses or models being compared, with the first and second subscript referring to the alternative hypothesis/model of interest and the null hypothesis/model, respectively.
2. For all analyses, we used R (Version 4.0.2; R Core Team, Citation2013) and the R-packages BayesFactor (Version 0.9.12.4.2; Morey and Rouder Citation2018), Bayesrel (Version 0.7.0.3; Pfadt et al. Citation2021), beeswarm (Version 0.2.3; Eklund Citation2016), coda (Version 0.19.4; Plummer et al. Citation2006), dplyr (Version 1.0.5; Wickham et al. Citation2021), Matrix (Version 1.3.2; Bates and Maechler Citation2010), papaja (Version 0.1.0.9997; Aust and Barth Citation2018), qualtRics (Version 3.1.4; Ginn and Silge Citation2021), report (Version 0.3.0; Makowski et al. Citation2021), scales (Version 1.1.1; Wickham and Seidel Citation2020), tinylabels (Version 0.1.0 Barth Citation2020), and wesanderson (Version 0.3.6; Ram and Wickham Citation2018).
3. This is the default “wide” prior scale in the BayesFactor package (Morey & Rouder, Citation2018).