Health knowledge plays an important role in health education and promotion, in providing critical services to the global population and helping them live healthier lives and make informed health decisions. This study explores what determines health knowledge adoption in the context of Chinese social media, and attempts to explain why there is a gap between health knowledge adoption intention and behavior. Based on the ELM (elaboration likelihood method) and EPPM (extended parallel process model), this paper proposes four processes of health knowledge adoption to construct an explanatory framework, and examines it from the intention-behavior gap perspective, highlighting the mediating effect of trust. Data collected from 355 Chinese respondents was tested using a partial least squares (PLS) approach. The results indicate that perceived threat has a positive effect on health knowledge adoption via the mediator, fear; perceived efficacy has a positive direct effect on health knowledge adoption; and perceived knowledge quality and perceived source credibility both have a positive effect on health knowledge adoption via the mediator, trust. Trust and fear have different impacts on health knowledge adoption intention and behavior, which explains why there is sometimes a gap between them. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.
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