Opinion polls about voting intentions provide important information for citizens in
shaping their own political attitudes. Nevertheless, opinion polls are only useful
for democracies if people trust their results. This study aims to decompose trust
in poll results by focusing on two factors that may shape trust level: the source
polling institution and the results of the poll. In survey experiments embedded in
an online and a phone survey in Hungary, respondents were presented with two hypothetical
poll reports and were asked to assess how much they trusted them. We varied the source
institution (6 levels) and whether the results were realistic or not realistic. The
results show that despite the highly politicized research environment in Hungary,
the research institution did not play a role in general or among people with different
political views. In turn, accuracy was a strong positive predictor of trust in the
phone survey, but we found traces of motivated reasoning, partially depending on political
sophistication. We conclude that trust processes are complex, with source credibility
not always determining trust, but individual political motivations consistently shaping
perceptions.
