Should I trust him? The effects of reviewer profile characteristics on eWOM credibility Qian Xu ⇑ School of Communications, Elon University, 2850 Campus Box, Elon, NC 27244, United States article info Article history: Available online 11 February 2014 Keywords: Cognitive trust Affective trust Credibility Profile characteristics Bandwagon perception Social presence abstract For online consumer reviews to serve as decision-making aids, users have to first trust the reviewer. However, unlike face-to-face communication, where trust develops overtime, consumers have to rely on personal profile information to establish confidence in the reviewer in online shopping context. These personal profile characteristics may serve as cues of source credibility. This study adopts a 2 (number of trusted members: small, large) Â 2 (profile picture: without, with) Â 2 (review valence: negative, posi- tive) between-participants experiment to explore how two personal profile characteristics, reputation cue and profile picture, influence cognitive trust and affective trust towards the reviewer and perceived review credibility respectively and in a combinatory manner. The findings of the study showed that rep- utation cue and profile picture cue contributed differently to users’ affective trust and cognitive trust towards the reviewer. Reputation cue, generated by the system, was found to influence both affective and cognitive dimensions of trust, whereas the self-generated cue of profile picture affected only affective trust. Reputation cue had a direct influence on perceived review credibility, whereas the influence of pro- file picture on perceived review credibility was dependent upon review valence. The implications of these findings are discussed in the paper. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction With the growth of electronic commerce, there are more and more online consumer communities, such as Epinions.com and Resellerratings.com, encouraging consumers to share their product reviews with others. These reviews and comments shared by other online consumers are called the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) that differs from the traditional oral form of interpersonal communication among acquaintances (Cheung & Thadani, 2010). eWOM is defined as the Internet-mediated opinions and recom- mendations on products and services from peers (Dellarocas, Zhang, & Awad, 2007). It may serve as decision-making aids when consumers are faced with the abundant product information and alternative choices (Xie, Miao, Kuo, & Lee, 2011). They were found to successfully influence consumers’ information search, product attitude and purchase intention (Cheung & Thadani, 2010; Doh & Hwang, 2009). For eWOM to be effective as decision-making aids, consumers have to first trust the reviewer. In traditional WOM communica- tion, the information source is usually a known acquaintance. The close bond and long-term interpersonal interaction between the information sender and receiver contribute to the development of trust in the source (Keller, 2007). However, most of eWOM is from individuals largely unknown to the consumer. The lack of past interaction and the unfamiliarity with identity make it diffi- culty for consumers to assess the trustworthiness of eWOMer, as well as the credibility of eWOM message. They would therefore look for any available surface indicators to reduce the uncertainty about the product reviewer, such as the various characteristics dis- played in the profile. These profile characteristics could play important roles in consumer’ decision making as cues of source trustworthiness (Park, Xiang, Joisam, & Kim, 2013). The reviewer profile on most online consumer review websites includes both self-created cues, such as profile picture, and sys- tem-generated cues, like the reputation among other users. De- spite the realized importance of profile cues (Park et al., 2013), it is unknown how these different characteristics vary in their respective capacities and psychological mechanisms to influence the evaluation of eWOMer and how the co-existence of different characteristics would moderate the influence of each other. There- fore, one of the main purposes of this study is to explore the indi- vidual and combinatory effects of profile characteristics on consumers’ impression of the product reviewer. The trust generated by the consumer in the reviewer may in- volve multiple dimensions (Lewicki & Bunker, 1996; McAllister, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.027 0747-5632/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Tel.: +1 (336) 278 6454. E-mail address: qxu@elon.edu Computers in Human Behavior 33 (2014) 136–144 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers in Human Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh