If you are quick enough, I will think about it: Information speed and trust in public health organizations

Abstract

Social media continues to gain prominence as an information resource. However, little is known about how people perceive trust and credibility in social media messages, particularly in terms of abstract dispositions toward organizations. The current experiment examines the role of speed of updates on a twitter feed with perceptions of trust. The experiment is also used to address the convergent validity of the RAND Public Health Disaster Trust Scale. The results do not provide evidence of a direct relationship between speed of twitter feed updates and trust, but do support a mediation model in which cognitive elaboration mediates the relationship. Further, the convergent validity of the RAND Public Health Disaster Trust Scale is discussed, along with its utility for future studies of this type.