No Trust Without Efficacy: Establishing the Causal Relationship Between Trust and External News Efficacy Through Multi-Modal Conjoint Experiments

Recent advancements in news media trust research suggest that trust entails a decision to suspend vulnerability and uncertainty toward news media (Blöbaum, 2021). Among the possible factors affecting trust in journalists, individuals’ level of “external news efficacy” – a person’s belief in their capacity to influence the newsmaking process and their perception of the media system’s responsiveness and utility for them – could play an important and overlooked role. To assess the causal relationship between perceptions of external news efficacy and trust, we design and field two diffeent conjoint experiments – a textual and a visual one – on a representative sample of Italians. In the first conjoint experiment, the respondents are asked to evaluate profiles of journalists differing in their sociodemographic characteristics (gender and age), their popularity, and in traits affecting perceptions of news efficacy. We manipulate their willingness to listen to their publics (listening) – i.e., reading comments on social media – their responsiveness to the public’s suggestions (influence), their willingness to explain journalistic choices to their public (transparency), and how easy it is to contact them directly (accessibility). Crucially, in this first study, profiles are presented in a textual tabular form, and so is each characteristic. In the second experiment, we move to a visual conjoint setting, asking respondents to evaluate their trust in journalists observing fictional Instagram profiles of politicians randomly generated through the use of image manipulation techniques and AI. The two experiments are designed to measure the same conjoint attributes, but through stimuli presented in different forms. Particularly, we are going to manipulate the perceptions of news efficacy by generating profiles with randomly varying social media posts representing high or low levels of Through this study, not only do we aim to collect strong evidence through multiple experiments, allowing us to make strong causal claims on the link between perceived news efficacy and trust in journalists, but we also provide a consequential methodological contribution for experimental communication research.