Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Citizens in a democracy must navigate an increasingly dense information landscape. Regulation can aid this navigation by mandating disclosures of the source and nature of political campaign material. In many countries, legislators are increasing transparency requirements for online advertising in particular. The current paper looks at how and if citizens use such disclaimers to infer the intent of political advertisers during the process of a trust evaluation. This paper describes a survey experiment that specifically investigates evaluations of unknown campaigners, theorising such conditions will maximise any effect disclaimers have on trust. Testing both sponsorship and micro-targeting disclaimers, no support is found for the theoretical claim that viewing a disclaimer can increase how trustworthy a political advertiser is perceived to be. There is preliminary support that, for some individuals, viewing a disclaimer increases scepticism.