Suchergebnisse

With the rampant increase of misinformation produced and distributed online at an alarming rate, it has become more imperative than ever to understand what makes people fall for misinformation. Drawing on the literature on persuasion, credibility of online information, and digital deception, we first review a list of factors associated with the source, message, channel, and receiver that may alter the extent to which people judge information as truthful and believable. Based on critical assessments of the gaps in the literature, suggestions are offered to shape future research agendas and develop an integrative conceptual framework.

The present experiment investigated (a) if exposure to a high profile politician's Twitter page (vs. newspaper interview) affects the participants' evaluations of him and his policies and (b) how their proclivity to get deeply immersed in a narrative and identify with the story characters (i.e., transportability) moderates such effects. Even though the messages were identical, exposure to the candidate's Twitter page heightened the sense of direct conversation with him (i.e., social presence), which in turn induced more favorable impressions of and a stronger intention to vote for him among those high in transportability. Increased social presence also led to stronger agreement with the candidate's policy statements among those espousing favorable attitudes toward him. However, those presented with the newspaper interview better recognized the issues mentioned and had fewer thoughts about the candidate, suggesting that people adopt medium-specific processing strategies, focusing more or less on the source (vs. issue).

Disinformation presented in multiple modalities (textual, visual, and auditory modes; multimodal disinformation) has become a serious concern. This study examines how disinformation, portrayed using an image or video format, may be more powerful than text-only disinformation. In particular, we examined the impact on affective mechanisms, as well as the moderating role of perceived issue relevance. Through an online experiment with modality conditions and a control group (text-only disinformation vs image-plus-text disinformation vs video-plus-text disinformation vs control; N = 413), results indicate that while anxiety is a critical mechanism that explains the overall effects of disinformation on misperceptions, video-plus-text disinformation turns out to increase misperceptions directly or indirectly through anxiety. Video-plus-text disinformation (vs control) showed a significant interaction with perceived issue relevance; that said, the difference in anxiety decreased between those with low and high perceived issue relevance in the video-plus-text disinformation. Implications are discussed in light of the realism heuristic, affect heuristic, and modality-biased processing in explaining the emotional impact of multimodal disinformation.

Previous research found that computer-mediated communication (CMC) users affectively compensate for partners when they believe their partners' negative demeanor to be malleable, but unlike in other media, they discount their own influence on their partner. This research examined attributions that chat users make when they influence their partners but do not recognize their own causal influence. Dyads conducted either online text-based conversations or audio interactions. Each male dyad member was told that his female partner (who was actually naïve) was in a bad mood or had an unpleasant personality. Although they had rated their ability to influence others' demeanors as lesser when using CMC compared with those who anticipated telephone (audio), males acted more pleasantly when expecting a bad mood, and rated the partner as behaving more pleasantly, in CMC. In CMC, males filled the attributional gap by inferring that partners' behavior reflected partners' liking toward them. These findings extend the hyperpersonal model of CMC to explain how illusions about partners' affection may come to influence the sociability of online interaction and vice versa.

Social media present prime opportunities for commercial brands to promote their products. Some user-generated comments, however, hamper brands' promotion efforts with fake claims. The literature on warranting theory suggests that if a company controls the dissemination of user-generated comments of its products, it may backfire against the company by reducing the warranting value of favorable comments. The current study proposes that a company's justification for their information control behavior can restore the warranting value of user-generated comments. Drawing upon the literature on fairness theory and mindlessness, the study investigated the effectiveness of two types of justifications varying in their legitimacy. Results from a web-based experiment ( N = 221) with four conditions (no evidence of dissemination control vs. no justification vs. placebic justification vs. real justification) confirm that when a company offers a legitimate justification for deleting users' comments, it mitigates negative evaluations that may result from the company's information control behavior.