Research Award 2021

13.10.2021

Teresa Weikmann, Alina Nikolaou and Hannah Greber won the Research Award of the Department of Communciation 2021 with their proposal "Do you believe? How different forms of deepfakes challenge our trust in the senses".

If presented with media-rich deepfakes, do people lose trust in their own ability to spot deepfakes? In their research project "Do you believe? How different forms of deepfakes challenge our trust in the senses", Teresa Weikman, Alina Nikolaou and Hannah Greber want to investigate to which extent the media richness of deepfakes challenge the trust in one's own (audio-) visual senses. 

They do so by firstly, investigating to which extent different media formats with varying levels of media richness are evaluated as credible, and in a next step, to which extent the reveal of having seen a deepfake challenges the trust of participants in their own ability to see, hear and ultimately judge whether a media form is real or fake. Thus, this research project addresses one pressing question raised when discussing deepfakes, namely the assumed decrease of trust in one's own senses and therefore, the ability to trust what we see, hear and experience.