The present study investigates the role of source characteristics, the quality of evidence, and prior beliefs of the topic in adult readers' credibility evaluations of short health-related social media posts. The researchers designed content for the posts concerning five health topics by manipulating the source characteristics (source's expertise, gender, and ethnicity), the accuracy of the claims, and the quality of evidence (research evidence, testimony, consensus, and personal experience) of the posts. After this, accurate and inaccurate social media posts varying in the other manipulated aspects were programmatically generated. The crowdworkers (N = 844) recruited from two platforms were asked to evaluate the credibility of up to ten social media posts, resulting in 8380 evaluations. Before credibility evaluation, participants' prior beliefs on the topics of the posts were assessed. The results showed that prior belief consistency and the source's expertise affected the perceived credibility of the accurate and inaccurate social media posts the most after controlling for the topic of the post and the crowdworking platform. In contrast, the quality of evidence supporting the health claim mattered relatively little. The source's gender and ethnicity did not have any effect. The results are discussed in terms of first- and second-hand evaluation strategies.
翻译:本研究调查了来源特征、证据质量以及先前信念对成年读者对短期健康相关社交媒体帖子的可信度评估的影响。研究人员通过操纵内容为五个健康主题的社交媒体帖子,涉及来源特征(专业知识、性别和种族)、声明的准确性以及帖子的证据质量(研究证据、证言、共识和个人经验)。然后,根据其他操纵的方面生成了变化的准确和不准确的社交媒体帖子。从两个平台招募的众包工人(N = 844)被要求评估多达十个社交媒体帖子,共得到8380个评估。在可信度评估之前,评估参与者的先前信念主题。结果显示,在控制了帖子主题和众包平台之后,在准确和不准确的社交媒体帖子的可信度评估中,先前信念的一致性和来源的专业知识对于影响最大。相比之下,支持健康声明的证据质量相对较小。来源的性别和种族没有任何影响。结果从一手和二手评估策略的角度进行了讨论。