Secondary Crisis Communication. A question of Actual or perceived credibility?

Abstract

An important aspect of crisis communication is secondary crisis communication, which focuses on how people communicate during a crisis. This study seeks to explore the mechanism of credibility in secondary crisis communication. Respondents in a large-scale experiment (N=2382) were exposed to a fictional news story about a terrorist attack and asked to what degree they would share the news story on social media. The design made it possible to test if the sharing of news stories was determined by its actual credibility (through the use of semiotic disclaimers in the news story), or by perceived credibility (the perceived credibility of the news story). Other factors, such as the severity of the threat in the story, trust in news media, to what extent emotions were evoked by the news story, gender, and age, were used as controls. Results indicated that the perceived credibility was more important than the actual message credibility.