Reading for University or for Myself? Effects of Context and Beliefs about Science on College Students' Document Selection

International audiencePrevious research on document selection has found that college-level readers aregenerally able to differentiate trustworthy from less trustworthy sources. Yet, a preferencefor selecting trustworthy sources may depend on features of the reading situation andreaders’ beliefs in science. In the current study, college students were tasked with selectingdocuments for either a university assignment or a personal project (external contextmanipulation) using documents that varied in the type of source (i.e., a source with scientificexpertise or a source with personal experiences) as a within-participants manipulation.Moreover, participants’ beliefs about science and knowledge about how science works wereassessed. In two experiments (N=165 and N=125), participants selected documents forfurther reading for four target topics. In Experiment 2, a personal condition was added thatincluded mention of an external audience for the assignment. Like in previous studies,participants in both experiments preferred scientific-expertise sources over personal-experiences sources. However, their likelihood of selecting a personal-experiences sourcewas higher in a personal context without an external audience (compared to universitycontext). More positive beliefs about science as well as knowledge about how science workswere associated with a lower probability of selecting sources with personal experiences.Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 and extended the findings regardingexternal context. Although college-level readers generally prefer scientific sources, theirselection of sources without scientific expertise also depends on the external reading contextas well as on personal beliefs and knowledge about scienc