The Research And Evidence Behind The Trust Grader

• Pooja, K., & Upadhyaya, P. (2024). What makes an online review credible? A systematic review of the literature and future research directions. Management Review Quarterly. A review of 69 studies: writing from a source whose identity is shown is judged more credible than writing from an unidentified one. Link
• Li, J., & Liang, X. (2021). Reviewers' identity cues in online product reviews and consumers' purchase intention. Frontiers in Psychology. Three experiments with about 1,200 people: small clues about who the writer is make them feel like a real person, and raise how much they are believed. Link

On your own website, your name gets the credit, and nobody can switch you off.

I learned this on my own skin. On Friday 10 August 2007, Google took all the pages of my site, MasterNewMedia, out of its search results. In a few days my visitors went from about 15,000 a day to 3,000 or 4,000. No warning, no email. I was the cause. I just did not see right away what I had done. When I looked, I found things on my site that broke Google's rules. But nobody told me. (What I wrote that week)

A week later my pages came back. (I wrote about that too) Then the penalty returned, and it never really ended. My earnings, which came from Google ads, went from tens of thousands to one, two, three thousand. Years of work stopped reaching people from one day to the next.

I have seen the same happen to people on Facebook, on YouTube and elsewhere. Never a warning. Always the same confusion, the same distress, and no way to contest it. Only digital bureaucracies designed so that you give up before you even try.

I can see Google's reasons. But for an honest publisher, willing to take responsibility and change things, it would have been much better to be told where I went wrong and what to fix. Even if it meant I had to admit my mistake publicly. And then to be allowed to learn and grow. We would both have gained from it.

The one thing Google could not take was the work itself: the stories, everything I had published. It was on my own site, and it still is. If I had published all of it on a platform owned by someone else, it could have disappeared altogether. So I could change direction. I stopped building my business on Google ad money, and I started teaching other independent journalists and bloggers my method: how I had been able to make those revenues, and what was good and bad about it.

• Horta Ribeiro, M., Jhaver, S., Cluet i Martinell, J., Reignier-Tayar, M., & West, R. (2024). Deplatforming norm-violating influencers on social media reduces overall online attention toward them. arXiv preprint, not yet peer reviewed. After 101 influencers were removed from platforms, the attention they got across the whole web fell by 63% on Google searches and 43% on Wikipedia, a year later. These were people who broke platform rules, so they are not like the experts I grade. What the study shows is how much of a person's visibility lives inside places they do not own. Link
• Kalogeropoulos, A., Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2019). News brand attribution in distributed environments: Do people know where they get their news? New Media & Society. People who went straight to a site named the source correctly far more often than people who arrived through social media or search. Link
• Cutolo, D., & Kenney, M. (2021). Platform-dependent entrepreneurs: Power asymmetries, risks, and strategies in the platform economy. Academy of Management Perspectives. People whose work depends on a platform can be suspended without warning or reason, and lose their followers with the account. The authors' advice: build your own channel. Link

Until September 2026, and for the last few years, the photo on most of my profiles showed me with a strange cap and dark black sunglasses. I fell in love with that photo. It looked neat and nice, and it was me: the cap, the glasses, the moustache, the grey-white beard.

Then, working on this very grader, I looked at my own photo the way I look at anyone's page, critically. And I saw it. You build trust by seeing somebody's eyes.

I regret having fallen in love with my own face and look. It is such an easy mistake to make. Everybody does it. But building the Trust Grader made me more critical, also of my own things. So I am going to change it. Period.

• Troncoso, I., et al. (2023). Look the part? The role of profile pictures in online labor markets. Marketing Science. On Freelancer.com, across 2 million applications from 160,014 freelancers, the profile picture shaped who got hired, more so when there were many candidates. Link
• Bente, G., Baptist, O., & Leuschner, H. (2012). To buy or not to buy: Influence of seller photos and reputation on buyer trust and purchase behavior. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. A seller with no photo and no reputation drew the most distrust. Even a less likeable photo did no worse than no photo at all. Simply reducing the "who is this?" doubt built trust. Link
• Wang, Z., Mao, H., Li, Y. J., & Liu, F. (2017). Smile big or not? Effects of smile intensity on perceptions of warmth and competence. Journal of Consumer Research. On Kickstarter, founders with a slight smile in their photo raised about twice as much as those with a broad smile. The slight smile looked more competent.
• Athey, S., Karlan, D., Palikot, E., & Yuan, Y. (2026 version). Smiles in profiles: Improving efficiency while reducing disparities in online marketplaces. Working paper. On the lending site Kiva, smiling profile photos were chosen for funding clearly more often, and photos with sunglasses less often. Link

• Curry, A. L., & Stroud, N. J. (2021). The effects of journalistic transparency on credibility assessments and engagement intentions. Journalism. Giving readers information about the author, and about why and how something was written, raised credibility across political views. Link
• Saffran, L., Hu, S., Hinnant, A., Scherer, L. D., & Nagel, S. C. (2020). Constructing and influencing perceived authenticity in science communication: Experimenting with narrative. PLOS ONE. A scientist telling their own path into the work, in the first person, came across as more authentic. Link
• Wojdynski, B. W., & Varnum, C. N. (2023). The Search for Credibility. The Trust Project. In an eye-tracking study with 79 adults, information about the author's expertise got more attention than the other trust elements tested. Link

• Harley, A. (2016). Trustworthiness in web design: 4 credibility factors. Nielsen Norman Group. From years of user testing: people want contact details shown up front, without forms to fill. Link
• Seckler, M., Heinz, S., Forde, S., Tuch, A. N., & Opwis, K. (2015). Trust and distrust on the web: User experiences and website characteristics. Computers in Human Behavior. Sites people distrusted felt dishonest and uncaring. Sites they trusted felt honest and competent. Link
• Fogg, B. J., et al. (2001). What makes web sites credible? CHI 2001. An older study, but the largest on this: among 1,410 people, a listed phone number and email address were among the things that raised credibility most. Link

Where I live says something about me too. I cannot prove this. It is only what I believe. When people find out where I am, I see them get curious. Some get a little envious, in a good way. I think they see that I am freer than most, and that I go to places that match the things I write about.

I did not go to Las Vegas, or to a business city like London or Paris. First I went to an island full of nature, and cows. Then to a sandbank in the Caribbean. Now I live on a quiet, green island in the Gulf of Thailand, between flowers, palm trees and birds.

I never decided to become a digital nomad. I only wanted to be free to live where I feel at home, in peace, without stress all around me. I think people pick this up just by seeing where I live. They see that I live the things I write about.

• Fogg, B. J., et al. (2001). What makes web sites credible? A report on a large quantitative study. CHI 2001. 1,410 people rated 51 website elements. "The site lists the organization's physical address" raised credibility the most of all: +1.86 on a scale from -3 to +3, ahead of a phone number (+1.71) and an email address (+1.53). Old, but nothing newer has tested it this directly. Link
• Heuer, H., & Glassman, E. L. (2024). Reliability criteria for news websites. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. When 23 politicians and 20 journalists judged whether a site was reliable, one of the things they looked for was who is behind it and who owns it, including the legal ownership notice with a name and address. Link
• Harley, A. (2016), as above. People want the basic facts about who you are shown up front.

Robin Good is not my real name. My real name is Luigi Canali De Rossi. When I decided to build something serious, for the long run, I chose a new name, for two reasons.

The first was that my real name is too long and hard to say. Most of my readers were in English-speaking countries, and they could not even tell my first name from my last name.

The second was that I wanted a name that said who I am before people read me. If your name is Mario Bianchi, your name carries no meaning. If your name is Napoleon, or Robin Hood, it does. I spent about six months looking for mine.

Robin Good borrows from Robin Hood, a story that people all over the world already know. And I gave him a home. Robin Hood came from the forest of Sherwood. I come from Sharewood, with "share" in it, the place where people share things. When I started, in the early 2000s, sharing things in public was not normal at all. It took a long time to become normal. So saying right away that I come from the place where people share meant something. And Robin Hood meant even more, at least in my head: an independent rebel who stands up to the rich and to authority, to help the ones who normally do not get a chance. That is the role I wanted to play in my work.

In June 2025 I was at the Purple Frog, a beach bar in Taling Ngam, here on Koh Samui. I met a man who was there for a short holiday. We were watching the sunset and chatting about nothing much, getting to know each other a little. When he heard what I do, he asked where he could read my writing. I gave him my web address, with "robingood" in it. He said: "Oh, but you are Robin Good! I never thought I would meet you." He had read me in the past. The name had stuck.

So from the first minute, he trusted me and took me seriously. Without the name, if we had become friends, it would have taken me days, weeks or months to earn that.

• Metzger, M. J., & Flanagin, A. J. (2013). Credibility and trust of information in online environments: The use of cognitive heuristics. Journal of Pragmatics. One of the main shortcuts people use to judge a source online is simply whether they recognize the name. Link
• Montoya, R. M., Horton, R. S., Vevea, J. L., Citkowicz, M., & Lauber, E. A. (2017). A re-examination of the mere exposure effect. Psychological Bulletin. A large review: seeing something again makes it feel more familiar and more liked, up to a point. Link

This is the check I weigh most.

That one sentence has been in refinement for all my professional life. I keep asking myself the question, and I keep looking for better ways to say it, and above all for the words the people I want to help would use themselves. And it keeps evolving.

It started with the first tagline of MasterNewMedia, when the internet was just arriving. It spoke to people who had strong knowledge about something and needed to communicate it publicly: independent publishers, authors, journalists, people working in NGOs, speakers at conferences. People caught in the passage from paper to digital.

Over the years it shifted towards helping indie authors, publishers, artists, professionals and small studios become the reference point, the go-to person, in their niche. Without saying it openly, I was going from communication methods to strategies and models that could let people become independent from their nine-to-five, from a way of working that I see as really enslaving.

Today the people are the same. What changed is the help: making visible to others how competent and expert they really are. Learning how to be credible, authoritative and trusted, so that people more easily lean into their advice, their services and their products.

These are the MasterNewMedia taglines over the years:

• From 2000: "Free Alternative and Independent News on New Media Technologies, Tools and Methods"
• From 2004: "What Communications Experts Need To Know"
• From 2007 on: "Be Smart, Be Independent, Be Good"

• Nielsen, J. (2011). How long do users stay on web pages? Nielsen Norman Group. Based on a Microsoft Research study of over 2 billion page visits (Liu, White & Dumais, 2010): people leave fast unless the value of the page is clear within about 10 seconds. Link
• Markowitz, D. M. (2024). From complexity to clarity: How AI enhances perceptions of scientists and the public's understanding of science. PNAS Nexus. Simply written summaries made scientists look more credible and trustworthy than complex ones. Link
• Thon, F. M., & Jucks, R. (2017). Believing in expertise: How authors' credentials and language use influence the credibility of online health information. Health Communication. Heavy technical language made authors seem less honest.

I once gave a whole talk with this title. It was at TEDxAssisi, in Italy, in November 2015, and it is called What I stand for. In it I tell about an accident where I broke my femur bones, and the few weeks I spent in hospital after it. I tell what happened in there, and what stayed with me. At the end I name the five things I care about most: helping others, learning to learn, listening, sharing, and living with passion.

It is a very personal talk. And only now, working on this page, I noticed it is not on my own home page. So I am going to add it.

• Goodwin, G. P., Piazza, J., & Rozin, P. (2014). Moral character predominates in person perception and evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across seven studies, what people knew about someone's moral character shaped their overall impression far more than how warm they seemed. Link
• Siegrist, M. (2021). Trust and risk perception: A critical review of the literature. Risk Analysis. A review of decades of research: people trust those whose values seem similar to their own. Link
• Song, H., & Gyamfi, P. A. (2025). How values guide trust. Science Communication. In an experiment, experts who showed their values changed how much people trusted them, and the effect depended on the reader's own values. Link

So here is one piece of my own work. Marco Ronco started as a fan of my work. Then he became a guest I interviewed. Later we worked together as equals, as he became a very good SEO specialist. Today we are friends.

About five or six years ago he sent me his new personal home page and asked what I thought. I redesigned it completely. I gave him specific mock-ups and specific photos, and he still uses that design today at marcoronco.me. I feel, maybe presumptuously, that I am the author of that design. I have always loved the result: such a clean, elegant page, rare to see.

If you give marcoronco.me to the Trust Grader today, it scores 65: credible, with gaps. At the time I worked on the information design of the page, not on its credibility. I believe anybody can still appreciate the design. The grader shows, one by one, the things I did not think about then.

• Harley, A. (2016). Trustworthiness in web design: 4 credibility factors. Nielsen Norman Group. One of the four factors: content that is complete and correct, showing real work and real processes, not only claims. Link

• Cao, R., Hashim, N. B., & Abdul Rahman, S. N. (2026). How heuristic credibility cues shape perceived credibility on social media: A meta-analysis of experimental research. Behavioral Sciences. 18 experiments, 14,188 people: signals about the source raised credibility clearly, about twice as much as likes and shares. Link
• Metzger, M. J., & Flanagin, A. J. (2013), as above. People believe what others vouch for, and what several sources agree on.
• Harley, A. (2016), as above. In user tests, people trusted what outside sites said about a company more than what the company said about itself.

It is an extra because most good experts do not have one, and because Wikipedia is unfair to some people. In 2023, fewer than 20% of the biographies on English Wikipedia were about women. Taking points away from people without a page would punish them twice.

• Wikipedia: Notability (people). The rule: a person needs "significant coverage" in independent, reliable sources, and "autobiography and self-promotion are not the routes to having an encyclopedia article." Link)
• Thompson, N., & Hanley, D. (2017). Science is shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a randomized control trial. SSRN working paper. Adding Wikipedia articles on scientific topics changed what scientists themselves went on to write and cite. Even experts take cues from it. Link

• Ulsperger, A., et al. (2026). Authors' academic but not personal expertise or gender affect message credibility in science communication. Scientific Reports. Three pre-registered experiments: the same text was rated more credible when the author had academic expertise. To be fair, one of the three did not repeat the result. Link
• Cao et al. (2026), as above.

Over the years I have received many kind messages, but I could not pick one from memory. The most recent ones are about 260 reviews on my Facebook page, mostly in Italian.

• Pooja, K., & Upadhyaya, P. (2024), as above. Identity shown means more credible.
• Ismagilova, E., Slade, E., Rana, N. P., & Dwivedi, Y. K. (2020). The effect of characteristics of source credibility on consumer behaviour: A meta-analysis. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services. Across many studies, how expert and trustworthy the person recommending seems, and how similar they are to the reader, shape whether people believe the recommendation.
• Metzger, M. J., & Flanagin, A. J. (2013), as above. The endorsement shortcut.

My own example is the TEDxAssisi talk I told you about under What You Stand For. Someone invited me, and the recording is public, so anyone can check it.

• Cao et al. (2026) and Metzger & Flanagin (2013), as above.

• Jerez-Fernandez, A., Angulo, A. N., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). Show me the numbers: Precision as a cue to others' confidence. Psychological Science. People saw someone giving precise numbers as more confident, and chose precise advisers over vague ones. Link

I first gave this check 1 point. The research made me raise it to 5.

My home page says "I do not teach how to publish more." Here is why.

I was groomed, in the early years of the internet, by one idea. Since we could finally publish freely, without asking any gatekeeper, the more you published the better it was for you. Your ideas went out, more people saw you, and like-minded people could find you.

But as time went by, I remembered what I am really good at: organizing information, and looking beyond the surface of things. And volume, publishing more and more, is a surface thing.

So I chiseled away those outside influences, and let my nature as a curator have its way. A curator is a chooser, a picker, an organizer, a director. It was contrarian, different from what everybody else was doing, and it opened the door to more depth, more understanding, more sense-making, more insights.

These are the things I love. And they are also what helps the independent experts I work with build their credibility, expertise, authority and trust much better than going after volume ever could. That is what the line on my home page says, in eight words.

• Koetke, J., Schumann, K., Bowes, S. M., & Vaupotič, N. (2025). The effect of seeing scientists as intellectually humble on trust in scientists and their research. Nature Human Behaviour. Five pre-registered studies: scientists seen as humble about the limits of what they know were trusted more, and so was their research. Link
• O'Keefe, D. J. (1999). How to handle opposing arguments in persuasive messages: A meta-analytic review. Annals of the International Communication Association. An older review of 107 studies: messages that admit the other side and answer it were rated more credible. Link
• Kropiunig, A., Kremer, S., & Haslhofer, B. (2026). Credibility matters. arXiv preprint, not yet peer reviewed, small (13 interviews). Among the signs of credibility followers named: admitting the limits of what you know, and correcting yourself in public. Link

In my first years, roughly from 2001 to 2008, the things that brought me the most reach and appreciation were free things I built.

RSSTop55 was a list of the best directories where you could submit your RSS feed, so that your site would show up in the catalogs and apps people used to stay informed.

After the tsunami of December 2004, I built a showcase of all the grassroots videos about it I could find. A documentary in the making, made by the people who were there. In the following years, journalists, researchers and book editors wrote to me asking permission to use that material. I could not give it. The videos were not mine in the first place.

And again and again I built large maps of tools: the Newsmaster toolkit, maps of content curation tools, and a directory of online collaboration tools on the ZEEF platform, hundreds of them, organized by category by somebody who actually tried them. That one is gone now. And a news radar on curation, still online at curation.masternewmedia.org, with my titles and my comments on the best resources, news, tools and events in the field.

For about ten years now I have also been building tools.robingood.com, a public catalog of free, or next to free, tools for independent entrepreneurs, communication professionals, consultants, journalists and advisors. I find them, test them and write a short, simple review of each one, because I consider each of them a tool that could become part of my own toolkit.

I cannot prove that these free things made me more credible. I can only infer it, because I know what happens to me when someone creates something unique and valuable and lets me use it for free. I trust that person more.

• Gautam, R., Lauharatanahirun, N., Cloutier, J., & Kubota, J. T. (2026). Trusting in the competence of humans and artificially intelligent agents varying in generosity. Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. Generosity was "consistently rewarded with trust." Link
• Hendriks et al. (2015), as above. Good will is one of the three parts of trust in an expert.

• Ulsperger et al. (2026), as above.
• Thon & Jucks (2017), as above. Authors with credentials were seen as more credible.
• Kuutila, M., Kiili, C., et al. (2024). Revealing complexities when adult readers engage in the credibility evaluation of social media posts. Computers in Human Behavior. Adults judged posts mostly by the author's expertise. Link

• Harley, A. (2016), as above. "Current" is one of the four trust factors.
• Silberg, W. M., Lundberg, G. D., & Musacchio, R. A. (1997). Assessing, controlling, and assuring the quality of medical information on the Internet. JAMA. Old, but still the standard checklist: authorship, sources, disclosure, and currency, meaning the dates content was posted and updated.
• Westerman, D., Spence, P. R., & Van Der Heide, B. (2014). Social media as information source: Recency of updates and credibility of information. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Recent updates raised credibility, but indirectly. Link

Early this year I came across a man who seemed in tune with my ideas and values. I thought he was the right person to help me find the gaps in my strategy, update my editorial plan and business model, and check my positioning. He felt trustworthy and honest.

Then I went to check the links in his profile, and found his personal website. It looked very different from what I had learned from him. There were glaring design errors, things that clearly did not work on the page. It looked like nobody was taking care of it. And it talked about things that put distance between us, not warmth or trust.

I had liked him so much until that moment that I recorded a video screencast, going through his site critically, the way I normally do for experts in my audits. I sent it to him, hoping he would find it useful.

Later I bought a consulting session with him anyway. He was useful, and he gave me some good advice. He is a good person. But in the meeting he never mentioned the feedback I had sent him about his site. I do not know what that tells us.

• Witchel, H. J., et al. (2022). Spelling errors in brief computer-mediated texts implicitly lead to linearly additive penalties in trustworthiness. Frontiers in Psychology. Every error took a little more trust away, step by step: five errors cost more than twice as much as two. Link
• Metzger & Flanagin (2013), as above. Errors break what readers expect, and trust drops.
• Harley, A. (2016), as above.

• Same studies as "Recent, dated work" and "Care in the details" above.

• Rello, L., Pielot, M., & Marcos, M.-C. (2016). Make it big! The effect of font size and line spacing on online readability. CHI 2016. Eye-tracking: larger text, 18 points and up, made reading significantly easier. Link
• Wobbrock, J. O., et al. (2021). The Goldilocks zone: Young adults' credibility perceptions of online news articles based on visual appearance. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Medium-sized body text looked most credible. Credibility peaked in the middle, not at the extremes. Link
• Wallace, S., Bylinskii, Z., et al. (2022). Towards individuated reading experiences: Different fonts increase reading speed for different individuals. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. The font alone changed reading speed by up to 35%. Link

I cannot remember giving up on someone just because of a menu. If it happened, I forgot it, because it was wasted time. But I know very well how it feels to get very frustrated, and to be ready to switch, if only there were an equal tool without the same problem.

Almost every day I use an open source app that lets me store, archive, organize and distill all my knowledge and my writing. I really like this app. I have written about it, and I think it is extremely powerful.

A few weeks ago its builder, with the good intention of taking the app forward, changed the whole interface. Now, two or three weeks later, it still makes me frustrated to use it. Everything has changed place. Labels are different. Icons are unclear, or plain misleading. Nothing tells me clearly what it does. Finding my way around has become hard. I have used this tool for over six months. Not knowing where things are, just because a new version came out, for me is a drama.

But the tool is so good, and I have put so much of my time into it, that I will not drop it. I have also spent time trying to help improve it, on this point too, with little result so far. I will stick around. I am sure other users will push back and report the same thing. If the way around an app is not clear to the people who use it, as well as to the one who built it, fewer people will take it up, and more will get frustrated.

• Metzger & Flanagin (2013), as above. Hard navigation is one of the things that break expectations and lower trust.
• Seckler et al. (2015), as above. Distrusted sites were often described as having complex layouts.

• Seckler et al. (2015), as above. Pop-ups and complex layouts were the main triggers of distrust.
• Voigt, C., Schlögl, S., & Groth, A. (2021). Dark patterns in online shopping: Of sneaky tricks, perceived annoyance and respective brand trust. arXiv preprint. 204 people, two versions of the same shop. The version with manipulative tricks annoyed people more, and annoyance went together with lower trust in the brand. Link

• Lindgaard, G., Dudek, C., Sen, D., Sumegi, L., & Noonan, P. (2011). An exploration of relations between visual appeal, trustworthiness and perceived usability of homepages. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Trust was judged in 50 milliseconds. The most trusted home pages had balance, contrast and a moderate mix of pictures and text. Link
• Wobbrock et al. (2021), as above. Too many images lowered credibility.
• Skulmowski, A., et al. (2016). The negative impact of saturation on website trustworthiness and appeal. Computers in Human Behavior. Very saturated colors lowered trust. Link

• Pernice, K. (2017). F-shaped pattern of reading on the web: Misunderstood, but still relevant. Nielsen Norman Group. Eye-tracking: facing unbroken text, people read the top lines and the left edge and skip the rest. Link

• Google, web.dev. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). The measure the grader uses: "the render time of the largest image, text block, or video visible" on the first screen. Good is "2.5 seconds or less", poor is over 4. Link
• Galletta, D. F., Henry, R., McCoy, S., & Polak, P. (2004). Web site delays: How tolerant are users? Journal of the Association for Information Systems. In a controlled experiment, people's wish to come back to a site dropped as the wait grew, and most of the damage was done by the 4-second mark. Link
• Deloitte Digital for Google (2020). Milliseconds make millions. 37 brands, 30 million visits: making a mobile site just 0.1 seconds faster raised page views per visit by up to 8% and conversions by up to 10%. Link

It only counts when there is nothing in it for you. Links to your own clients, your affiliates or your own projects do not count.

I still remember the euphoric feeling of recognition I had in the early 2000s, reading Robert Scoble, one of the best-known bloggers of the time. He wrote down something I had felt for a long time. I have always remembered it as "send them away." In his Corporate Weblog Manifesto, on 26 February 2003, he said that if someone knows more than you, "you damn well better have links to them."

The general thinking was, and still is, that if you send people somewhere else you are working against your own interest. I think that is a very superficial way of seeing it.

If I have a friend who knows great food, and I ask him for a restaurant, and he sends me to a good one, I will always come back to him. If I talk about nuclear fusion with a scientist, and he explains it to me but also points me to the other people who discovered specific parts of it, I will want to go back to him more than to another scientist who only gave me his own view.

I think this is a life principle that goes beyond digital media and the internet. Someone who sends you towards valuable things, and away from himself, is one of the most valuable people you can rely on to discover, learn and expand what you know.

I have seen it most as a DJ. Your discoveries, and the way you put songs next to each other, sometimes make people fall in love with your choices. From then on they connect you with those songs, and with that atmosphere and energy.

• Zhou, L., Du, K. M., & Cutright, K. M. (2022). Befriending the enemy: The effects of observing brand-to-brand praise on consumer evaluations and choices. Journal of Marketing. About a dozen experiments: a brand that praised a rival looked warmer and more trustworthy, and was chosen 34% more often. Skeptical people were won over most. Link
• Zhao, H., Zhang, M., & Chen, H. (2025). Friends or enemies? The impact of partial competitor referral on consumer purchase. Journal of Retailing. A seller who sent customers to a competitor for some things was trusted more. The effect shrank when the referral was paid. Link
• Scoble, R. (2003, 26 February). The Corporate Weblog Manifesto. Scobleizer. Among his points: link to your competitors and say nice things about them, and link to anyone who knows more than you. Link
• Hoff, M., Galinsky, A. D., & Rucker, D. D. (2025). The vicious cycle of status insecurity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Giving others credit raised the standing of both the giver and the person credited. Hoarding credit made people look insecure. Link

In the last year or so I started to notice it. I was reading the articles of people I had come to know through private exchanges, comments and likes we had given each other. And their articles started to read very unlike them. Very polished, too polished to be human. Shallower. Richer and more decorated on the surface, and slicker, but losing depth. Losing the feeling that you were reading the story, the thinking, of somebody real.

• Jakesch, M., Hancock, J. T., & Naaman, M. (2023). Human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawed. PNAS. Six experiments, 4,600 people: readers decide a profile was written by a real person when it uses "I" and talks about family. The authors call these "intuitive but flawed heuristics", because AI can fake those clues too. Link
• Nakano, H., Takezawa, J., Matulic, F., Yang, C.-L., & Yatani, K. (2025). Understanding reader perception shifts upon disclosure of AI authorship. arXiv preprint. 261 people: when they learned AI was involved, the writer looked less trustworthy, less caring and less competent, most of all in personal writing. Link
• Akpinar, N.-J., et al. (2026). LLM or human? Perceptions of trust and information quality in research summaries. CHI 2026. Readers could not reliably tell human from AI text, but what they believed about AI involvement changed their trust. Texts written by a person and polished with AI were rated best. Link

• Packard, G., Moore, S. G., & McFerran, B. (2018). (I'm) happy to help (you): The impact of personal pronoun use in customer-firm interactions. Journal of Marketing Research. In real customer emails and in lab tests, "I" instead of "we" made customers about 19% more satisfied and raised their wish to buy by about 15%. Link
• Jakesch et al. (2023), as above. "I" is one of the clues readers use to decide a real person is writing.

Recently I stopped following someone I used to read, a European man from the academic world. Very elegantly, very indirectly, he was doing things that looked generous and good for others. In reality they were marketing tactics, to get more subscribers, more likes, more views. I unsubscribed and muted him everywhere.

• Metzger & Flanagin (2013), as above. The "persuasive intent" shortcut: anything that looks like selling triggers distrust.
• Voigt et al. (2021), as above. Pressure tricks annoyed people, and annoyed people trusted the brand less.
• Kropiunig et al. (2026), as above. Followers trusted people who turned down sponsorships that did not fit and set limits on their own self-promotion.

• Packard, G., & Berger, J. (2020). Thinking of you: How second-person pronouns shape cultural success. Psychological Science. Texts that addressed "you" were more successful. Link
• Sun, Z., Cao, C. C., Liu, S., Li, Y., & Ma, C. (2024). Behavioral consequences of second-person pronouns in written communications between authors and reviewers of scientific papers. Nature Communications. 25,679 exchanges: authors who addressed reviewers directly got warmer, shorter replies. Link