The Effects of Communicating Uncertainty on Public Trust in Facts and Numbers
Five experiments testing whether communicating epistemic uncertainty reduces public trust.
Citation
van der Bles, A. M., van der Linden, S., Freeman, A. L. J., & Spiegelhalter, D. J. (2020). The Effects of Communicating Uncertainty on Public Trust in Facts and Numbers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7672–7683.
Method
Five experiments, including a preregistered replication and a field study on BBC News (n = 5,780).
Claims used
- People do notice communicated uncertainty.
- Trust in facts, figures, and their sources declines only slightly, especially with verbal uncertainty.
Limitations: The context was news facts and numbers, not research notes.
Extracted principles
- Make evidence status visibleNot tested
Show the confidence status of a claim directly in listings and detail pages, without requiring hover.
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