Cue the Doctor: An Online Experiment to Understand the Factors Affecting Physician Credibility on Twitter When Sharing Health Information (Preprint)

Abstract

Largely absent from research on how users appraise the credibility of professionals as sources for the information they find on social media is work investigating factors shaping credibility within a specific profession, such as physicians.

We address debates about how physicians should use social media by comparing how a formal and casual appearance on a profile picture influences their credibility. Using prominence-interpretation theory, we posit an effect of a formal appearance on credibility conditional users’ social context, specifically whether they have a regular health care provider.

For this experiment, we recruited 205 social media users using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. We asked participants if they had a regular health care provider and then randomly assigned them to read one of three Twitter posts that varied only in the profile picture of the physician offering health advice. Next, we tasked participants with assessing the credibility of the physician and their likelihood of engaging with the tweet and the physician on Twitter. We used path analysis to assess whether participants having a regular health care provider impacted how the profile picture affected their ratings of physician’s credibility and their likelihood to engage with the tweet and physician on Twitter.

We found that the profile picture of a physician posting health advice in either formal or casual attire did not elicit significant differences in credibility, with ratings comparable to having no profile image. Among participants assigned the formal appearance condition, those with a regular provider rated the physician higher on a credibility than those without, which led to stronger intentions to engage with the tweet and physician.

The findings add to existing research by showing how the social context of information seeking on social media shapes the credibility of a specific professional. Practical implications for professionals engaging with the public on social media and combating false information include moving past debates about casual versus formal appearances and toward identifying ways to segment audiences.