Questions come from the Bluebook question bank.
Conventional theories of rhetoric hold that presenting information as coming from credentialed experts increases that information’s credibility. When communications researcher Sungkyoung Lee and her colleagues tested messages seeking volunteers for clinical trials, however, they found that participants in their study judged recruitment messages from former trial volunteers as significantly more credible than messages from doctors (i.e., credentialed experts). One reason for this may be that the doctors’ status as credentialed experts wasn’t ignored but rather was outweighed by participants’ views of the experiential relevance of the two types of messengers; that is, participants may have reacted the way they did because ______blank
Which choice most logically completes the text?