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The Impact of Profile Picture Facial Expressions on Review Credibility

Wang, Xinying
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7280-0187
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1450922456

Abstract Details

2016, Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, Journalism (Communication).
This study examines the relationship between perceived credibility of online product reviews and facial expressions, whether happy or angry, in reviewer profile pictures from the perspective of attribution theory. The first hypothesis proposed that consumers exposed to an angry-looking profile picture will be more likely to attribute a positive review to product performance rather than the reviewer’s perceived personality. The second hypothesis predicts that people rate a review with an angry-looking reviewer picture higher in credibility than one with a happy-looking picture. The hypotheses were tested by a between-group experiment with 138 participants recruited from Ohio University. The results suggested that there were no significant differences in either the attributions of positive reviews or credibility ratings between the participants who viewed happy-looking faces and those who viewed angry-looking faces. The findings imply that reviewer profile pictures displayed along product reviews on generic eWOM platforms might not be as influential as the reviews themselves on perceive credibility.
Hans Meyer (Committee Chair)
Jatin Srivastava (Committee Member)
Daniel Farkas (Committee Member)
57 p.
Communication; Marketing
eWOM; facial expressions; profile pictures; credibility

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Wang, X. (2016). The Impact of Profile Picture Facial Expressions on Review Credibility [Master's thesis, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1450922456

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Wang, Xinying. The Impact of Profile Picture Facial Expressions on Review Credibility. 2016. Ohio University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1450922456.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Wang, Xinying. "The Impact of Profile Picture Facial Expressions on Review Credibility." Master's thesis, Ohio University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1450922456

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1450922456
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© 2016, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License The Impact of Profile Picture Facial Expressions on Review Credibility by Xinying Wang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.