The Limits of Online Consensus Effects: A Social Affirmation Theory of How Aggregate Online Rating Scores Influence Trust in Factual Corrections

Abstract

Research on bandwagon effects suggests that people will yield to aggregate online rating scores even when forming evaluations of contentious content. However, such findings derive mainly from studying partisan news selection behaviors, and therefore, are incomplete. How do people use ratings to evaluate whether factual corrections on contentious issues are trustworthy? Through what I term the social affirmation heuristic, I hypothesize, people will first assess rating scores for compatibility with their own beliefs; and then they will invest trust only in ratings of factual messages that affirm their beliefs, while distrusting ratings that disaffirm them. I further predict that distrusted ratings will elicit boomerang effects, causing evaluations of message trustworthiness to conflict with rating scores. I use an online experiment (n = 157) and a nationally representative survey experiment (N = 500) to test these ideas. All hypotheses received clear support. Implications of the findings are discussed.