How Dependable are "First Impressions" to Distinguish between Real and Fake NewsWebsites?

In an increasingly information-dense web, how do we ensure that we do not fall for unreliable information? To design better web literacy practices for assessing online information, we need to understand how people perceive the credibility of unfamiliar websites under time constraints. Would they be able to rate real news websites as more credible and fake news websites as less credible? We investigated this research question through an experimental study with 42 participants (mean age = 28.3) who were asked to rate the credibility of various "real news'' (n = 14) and "fake news'' (n = 14) websites under different time conditions (6s, 12s, 20s), and with a different advertising treatment (with or without ads). Participants did not visit the websites to make their credibility assessments; instead, they interacted with the images of website screen captures, which were modified to remove any mention of website names, to avoid the effect of name recognition. Participants rated the credibility of each website on a scale from 1 to 7 and in follow-up interviews provided justifications for their credibility scores. Through hypothesis testing, we find that participants, despite limited time exposure to each website (between 6 and 20 seconds), are quite good at the task of distinguishing between real and fake news websites, with real news websites being overall rated as more credible than fake news websites. Our results agree with the well-known theory of "first impressions'' from psychology, that has established the human ability to infer character traits from faces. That is, participants can quickly infer meaningful visual and content cues from a website, that are helping them make the right credibility evaluation decision.