It is the same headline, just not as believable: The role of expectancy violations in perceptions about news attributed to multiple sources

Abstract

Expectancy violations play important roles as heuristics in communication processes, yet prior research has focused more on incongruence between (news) sources and messages rather than assessing expectation levels as a mechanism for variations in message believability. An online experiment indicated that news headline believability for both a prominent daily newspaper and a religion news wire service was largely determined by an interaction between source trust and the extent to which news consumers were surprised of the headline’s origin.