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:本研究调查了社交媒体健康相关帖子的源特征、证据质量和主题先前信念对成年读者可信度评估的影响。研究人员通过操纵渠道特征(专家度、性别和种族)、主张准确性和证据质量(研究证据、证言、共识和个人经历),设计了五个健康主题的内容。接着,生成了具有其他操作方面不同的准确和不准确的社交媒体帖子。从两个平台招募的志愿者(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,评估者先前信念的评估被考虑进去。结果显示,控制帖子主题和平台后,先前信念一致性和渠道专业度是影响准确和不准确的社交媒体帖子的可信度评价最大的因素。相比之下,支持健康主张的证据质量问题相对较小。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讨论。