"Hearing is Believing: Spoken News is Perceived as More Credible Than Written News," by Yongkun Liu¹, Kurt Munz, and Chiara Longoni. Invited for revision and resubmission to the Journal of Consumer Research.
As podcasts and text-to-speech technologies proliferate, consumers increasingly encounter news in spoken rather than written form. Yet little is known about how this shift in consumption modality affects perceived news credibility. Six preregistered experiments (N = 3,679) using published news articles and accompanying audio from major media outlets show that spoken news is perceived as more credible than written news—the hearing-is-believing effect. This effect emerges both when modality is randomly assigned and when consumers choose, and it generalizes to news originally created for reading or for listening. The hearing-is-believing effect is driven by listening fluency, the subjective ease of processing spoken content relative to written text. Consumers misinterpret this ease of processing as a cue to credibility. Listening fluency can be reduced by background noise or by content formats that disrupt information processing. Beyond credibility judgments, listening to news increases trust in the news source and heightens consumers’ stated intentions to act on the news. These findings contribute to research on modality and fluency and highlight the psychological and policy implications of the shift toward spoken news being facilitated by voice technologies.