The Impact Of Online Identity Information On Perceptions Of User Credibility Evaluation

The rise of Internet-based social networking services (SNS) has helped people toform a larger and closer social graph. In this information era that’s lack of attentionwhile filled up with personalization demand, it’s worthy for us to dig out how the SNSusers could build up and reveal online identity, personal image and receiveidentification and support from others or society more effectively.Online identity construction is the starting point for users in the onlinecommunity to do the self-disclosure. Previous studies found that self-exposure ofinformation could affect the perception of information and individual’s cognition fromothers. Through online identity information presentation, the SNS users couldcomplete identification, build up the network interpersonal relationship, achieve thepraise from others and receive social support more effectively. However, researchersin their former studies paid little attention in the field that different characteristics ofthe same attribute information might have an impact on the information perception andthe effectiveness of the individual evaluation. Hence, the present study attempted toexplore whether different perceived disclosure characteristics of elements of auser-centric identity (such as, screen name, avatar and gender) would affect thecognition on individual trust and subsequent behavior choices under the high or lowinvolvement situations, under info-poor or info-rich condition in SNS.With the aid of e-prime software, this paper completed the design of experimentand individual credibility evaluation, obtained the results of repeated-measuresanalysis of variance and one-way ANOVA by SPSS software. Results showed thatunder the info-poor condition, user gender as the stimulus caused the main effect onindividual credibility evaluation significantly, female stimulus had more scoringadvantage; the screen name characteristics had a significant positive effect onindividual credibility evaluation; the avatar characteristics also had a significantpositive effect; stimulus gender and subject gender had a significant interaction effect;stimulus gender, screen name characteristics, the avatar characteristics and subjectgender also had a significant positive effect.Under the info-poor condition, results showed a certain stability and continuity ofthe impact on user/individual credibility evaluation caused by identity informationcharacteristics in different situations. Results showed both similarity and difference in the performance under different situations. In the info-rich condition, the impact wasweakened, but not disappeared or was replaced entirely. At the same time, results alsoaffirmed the advantage of credibility evaluation brought by info-rich, but theadvantage effect of the different characteristics of online identity caused the varianceof performance in different significant level. Finally, the significant impact of identityinformation characteristics on response time of evaluation was not vigorouslysupported.