Research has shown that laypeople tend to rely on their own evaluations when encountering scientific text information that is easy to comprehend. This easiness effect of science popularization leaves them vulnerable to uncritically accepting misinformation presented in a simplified manner. The present study investigated whether warnings of…

Text comprehension involves the ability to understand how texts relate to the situation they describe and to each other (i.e., a Document model). Research into Document models has emphasized the role of information sources in structuring readers' mental models of situations. The present article reviews research on source comprehension and examines…

Due to the increasing educational use of the Internet, children in elementary school need to critically evaluate source information to judge the trustworthiness of information. Studies with adult readers show that sourcing prompts and mutually exclusive claims in reading materials promote the use of source information. However, little is known…

Understanding conflicts between sources is an inherent part of science text comprehension. We examined whether readers' memories for conflicts and their situational interpretation of conflicts would be affected by reading goals and lexical cue phrases that signal rhetorical relationships. To this end, 198 undergraduates read multiple documents on…

Well-educated laypeople tend to rely on their own ability to evaluate scientific claims when they obtain information from texts with high comprehensibility. The present study investigated whether controversial content reduces this facilitating effect of high text comprehensibility on readers' self-reliance and whether the influence of…