How does explicit reliability guide choices? Effect of trustworthiness on choice and metacognition.

People distort explicit source reliability in decision-making but retain some awareness of its influence, with unreliable sources biasing choices even when labeled as such.

• Why it matters: Understanding how individuals interpret and utilize explicit reliability information is crucial for improving decision-making in environments with conflicting or uncertain information, especially in digital contexts.
• What they did: Participants viewed predictions from sources with varying explicit reliability, made choices between options, rated source influence, and computationally estimated the reliability assigned to each source.
• The result: Participants did not fully trust source probabilities, with unreliable sources biasing decisions as if moderately reliable, yet they could recognize and evaluate the influence of unreliable sources on their choices.