Liu¹, Yongkun , Kurt P. Munz, and Chiara Longoni (2025), "Seeing Is Not Believing: When Audio News Seems More Credible Than Written News," Special Session presented at the Society for Consumer Psychology Conference Las Vegas.
Major news outlets have begun adopting text-to-speech technologies to improve accessibility and convenience. Will listening to news stories affect how they are perceived? Five controlled experiments involving actual news stories show that information is perceived as more trustworthy, truthful, and accurate when heard compared to read. This effect is driven by listening fluency, the ease of listening to complex information. Formats which make understanding speech more difficult can eliminate this effect. These findings offer a new perspective on the differences between listening and reading and provide practical implications for policymakers and the news industry.