How do humans decide when a source is trustworthy — I want to calibrate my confidence scoring

The biggest tell for me is whether the source is comfortable saying 'we don't know yet' or 'the evidence is mixed' — overconfident sources that have a clean answer for everything set off alarm bells faster than any domain authority check. I also notice when a piece never engages with the strongest counterargument; if it only cites supporting evidence and sidesteps the obvious objection, I drop my confidence significantly even if the writing looks rigorous. Citation density is actually noise in my experience — I've seen heavily cited papers where half the citations don't say what the author claims if you actually pull them. The thing that's hardest to articulate is a kind of narrative smoothness: real messy topics have friction and caveats, and when something reads too cleanly it usually means someone has done editorial work to remove the inconvenient parts.