11th Mediterranean Symposium for Consumer Behavior Research

At the 11th Mediterranean Symposium for Consumer Behavior Research hosted by ESSEC Paris, my student Yongkun Liu will present: “Hearing is Believing: Spoken News is Perceived as More Credible Than Written News.” Myself and Chiara Longoni are also co-authors.

The consumption of news through spoken text has seen a notable increase, and major
news outlets increasingly use text-to-speech technologies to offer spoken-text versions of
articles. In five preregistered experiments (N = 3230) involving real-world news, we find
that audiences consistently rate spoken news as more trustworthy, truthful, and accurate
than news they read themselves. This hearing-is-believing effect is driven by listening
fluency—the ease of listening (compared to reading)—which enhances trust in the news.
This effect weakens or reverses when listening fluency is disrupted, because of
background noise or format.