Attitude confidence and source credibility in information foraging with social tags.

ABSTRACT: There is growing concern that online information searchers are overconfident and therefore largely search for information which reinforces their prior attitudes, blinded by confirmation bias. This study tests if this effect can be reduced in content aggregation platforms, when social tag clouds show popular topics among experts. We manipulated (1) confidence in prior attitudes, and (2) the credibility of the expert community that tagged the content. We found that both factors influence navigation in different ways. First, attitude confidence moderated the influence of prior attitudes when choosing how much attitude-consistent content in blog posts to read. When attitude confidence was high, prior attitudes were positively associated with selection of blog posts, when low, not positively as

SUBMITTER: Schweiger S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6333359 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature