What’s in a Name? How Title and Sex Can Affect Credibility
Every day, our clients appear in news stories in which they provide their expert point of view.
We were curious: Does a source’s sex or title affect their credibility? We conducted a study to find out.
To learn more about readers’ perceptions of sources quoted in online articles, we changed the names of the people who were quoted in three different Fast Company articles. We then asked nearly 2,000 people a few simple questions after they read each one.
We expected there to be at least some statistical evidence of bias.