The role of tie strength in assessing credibility of scientific content on facebook

Abstract

Social networking sites have become a major venue for dissemination of- and discussions about science-related topics. On these platforms, message credibility assessment takes into account not only traditional cues (like scientific arguments and information source), but also new types of social cues. Of the latter, we focus on tie strength, a central component of social networking sites, which has an important role in information flow, and the role of which in the process of message credibility assessment has been so far overlooked. We also consider two important and relevant meta-cognitive measures: need for cognition and expertise perception. Applying an experimental design in Facebook (N = 324), our findings suggest that need for cognition weakens the positive associations between tie strength and perceived message credibility. Also, both expertise perception and tie strength have positive effect on perceived message credibility.