The Impact of Cues to Expertise and Source Diversity on Belief in Health Claims
| dc.contributor.author | Asad, Nusrat | |
| dc.contributor.school | School of Psychology | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022 | |
| dc.description | This item is only available electronically. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | Social media has become one of the most frequently accessed sources of public health information. However, this ease of access is not without its drawbacks. Individuals face large quantities of conflicting medical advice online, often from diverse sources with varied expertise. It remains unclear how individuals judge the quality of such medical information. Therefore, this thesis investigates whether people are sensitive to important cues to the quality of health information, namely the expertise and diversity of sources. I conducted an online experiment with a sample of 103 participants, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Via a mock Twitter interface, participants were presented with various health claims followed by a set of related tweets supporting and refuting the claims. The tweets were presented as being posted by health organisations, individual experts, or laypersons and varied in source diversity (i.e., number of sources tweeting). Belief ratings for the claims were measured before and after viewing the related tweets to see if the expertise and diversity of the sources impact belief change. The results showed that individual experts and health organisations impacted belief change more than laypeople. Additionally, the effect of source diversity increased belief change when presented with related tweets from all source types (laypersons, individual experts and health organisations). Overall, the findings suggest that to increase belief in factual medical evidence, diverse individual experts and laypersons should collaborate with health organisation in public health communication. | en |
| dc.description.dissertation | Thesis (B.PsychSc(Hons)) -- University of Adelaide, School of Psychology, 2023 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/2440/140838 | |
| dc.provenance | This electronic version is made publicly available by the University of Adelaide in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. This thesis may incorporate third party material which has been used by the author pursuant to Fair Dealing exceptions. If you are the author of this thesis and do not wish it to be made publicly available, or you are the owner of any included third party copyright material you wish to be removed from this electronic version, please complete the take down form located at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/legals | |
| dc.subject | Honours; Psychology | en |
| dc.title | The Impact of Cues to Expertise and Source Diversity on Belief in Health Claims | en |
| dc.type | Thesis | en |
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