How you say or what you say? Neural activity in message credibility evaluation

Abstract

In the Internet era, understanding why humans find messages from unknown receivers credible (such as fake news) is an important research topic. Message credibility is an important theoretical aspect of credibility evaluation that relies only on message contents and design. For the first time in the field, we study message credibility by directly measuring brain activity of humans who make credibility evaluations in an experiment that controls message design. Brain activity as measured using EEG is used to investigate areas of the brain involved in message credibility evaluation. We also model and predict human message credibility evaluations using EEG brain activity measurements.