Researcher
University of Gothenburg
Jacob Sohlberg, PhD, is a researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where he studies public opinion and political psychology. Sohlberg, who grew up in Sweden, did his PhD at Stony Brook University, NY. He is a Fulbright alumni and former associate editor for the journal Political Psychology.
Uncertainty Phrases in Crisis News Reporting
Based on a survey experiment, we show that perceptions of news story reliability are reduced when they include phrases associated with high uncertainty, e.g., “unverified information,” “appears to be”. However, after large terrorist attacks, reliability perceptions are not influenced by uncertainty phrases, presumably because of the stressful crisis context.