People may be skeptical about medical and health information they encounter on crowdsourced sites, such as Wikipedia and Wikihealth, according to investigators. While that could be good information for health officials that are concerned that these websites allow non-experts to easily add and edit health information, the investigators added that using medical professionals curate content on these sites may not lessen the skepticism.
“There are major concerns about health misinformation that’s floating around, especially now with COVID-19,” said S. Shyam Sundar, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory and affiliate of Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Science (ICDS). “Now that anybody and everybody can generate health-related posts, it is natural to be concerned that information on these crowdsourced websites might influence people. Our study suggests that health practitioners need not get too worked up about these sites. Laypersons, like the participants in our study, do not trust the crowd, nor do they think that the information they provide is comprehensive.”
Online content that appears popular with the audience, such as articles that earn likes and retweets, a phenomenon that’s also known as the bandwagon effect, stated Yan Huang, assistant professor of integrated tactical communication, University of Houston, lead-author of this analysis, who worked together with Sundar. But, Huang said that the findings suggest that, as far as trust goes, people draw a line between content that has been endorsed with the audience and articles that has been edited by the audience.
“The effect of crowdsourcing may be different from the bandwagon effect because in this case, the crowd is not just liking or recommending existing content; the crowd is actually generating it,” said Huang. “And it seems that participants in our experiment were able to make that psychological distinction between the bandwagon effect — when people are just endorsing the content — versus people who are creating the content. Overall, participants didn’t trust the content that’s been collaboratively created by other people.”
The researchers, who report their findings in Health Communication, Added that their experimentation also shown another facet of the story: When participants found interactive features on the site that let them edit the material they trusted crowdsourced health posts more.
“When they realize that they could serve as the editor or author of the content, they are imbued with a sense of control on the site. The more aware they are of this interactivity, the more they trust the content,” said Huang.
In accordance with Sundar, the findings suggest that while people trust themselves as a source of credible content, they may be reluctant to trust other people.
“When you are the source, you think that the information is credible because you can add content, but if other people can also supply content, that seems to take away the credibility,” said Sundar.
Because crowdsourced content could be manipulated to include non-scientific advice or results, many health experts might feel that credentialing their crowdsourced posts can add authenticity to their articles. On the other hand, the investigators found that if content was curated, or even created by an expert, like a physician, participants didn’t find the information any more plausible to the reader. To indicate that the source was a professional, the investigators added that a doctor emblem and the name and name of a physician on the experimental site.
“Adding that professional source layer did increase the perception that there was a gatekeeper behind the content, in other words, people did think that the crowdsourced site had more gatekeeping when there were indications of a professional source, but it did not affect credibility judgments,” said Sundar.
The researchers added that because the findings show a lack of trust in health content on crowdsourced websites, webmasters of those sites may want to be certain interactive features are added and that they are prominent in the design. Interactive features have a tendency to boost customers’ positive perceptions of the origin and content, which might result in greater credibility on crowdsourced sites, they stated.
The researchers created eight distinct versions of a site called “Healthpedia” to test the various requirements of this experiment. The site mimicked the port of shared crowdsourcing websites, such as Wikipedia and WikiHow, for analyzing the effects of crowdsourcing. While some versions identified a physician as content editor, others provided editing functions and revealed that the material was created by over 45 individuals.
The study was conducted using a sample of 192 participants who were exposed to posts that featured dangers of pasteurized milk. The researchers said that the content was intentionally made controversial to better test the trustworthiness of this crowd as a source. According to the investigators, since the health articles were somewhat outlandish, future work could test if the perception holds for fairly regular health content.
Related Journal Article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10410236.2020.1824662