Tell-Tale Words

Abstract

This article analyzes the linguistic cues used by naïve perceivers to assess the expertise of online medical advice. We develop a theoretical framework of linguistic correlates to perceived expertise and test it on a corpus of 120 online medical advice messages, written by either medical doctors or laypersons. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analyses show that messages were perceived as more expert if they contained more words (an indicator of uncertainty reduction), fewer I-pronouns and anxiety-related words (indicators of psychological distancing), and more long words and negations (indicators of cognitive complexity). These linguistic cues explained over a third of the variance in expertise ratings. Although unaware of the author of each message, perceivers were able to discern between messages written by doctors versus laypersons. However, only long words were helpful in making this distinction. Results advance the literature on linguistic correlates of psychological processes.

Investigating the Role of Communication for Information Seekers’ Trust-Related Evaluations of Health Videos on the Web: Content Analysis, Survey Data, and Experiment

“…In this sense, an information seeker might perceive a specific language style used by the provider and then use it to judge some characteristics of the provider such as their competence or benevolence. In general, one’s language style can be characterized by numerous linguistic aspects (eg, the use of technical terms, self-references, or hedges), and a health information provider’s language style might impact a seeker’s judgments about their credibility and trustworthiness [34,35,40,41].…”

“…Information providers’ use of personal references (ie, referring to oneself or someone else) is closely associated with how people perceive providers’ expertise [40,41] and how much people learn from them [44], and hence, such references are of special interest for seeking health information. Linguistically, as self-references (eg, first-person pronouns) are related to the extent of a speaker’s self-disclosure, they might offer information about providers’ trustworthiness in 2 ways: on the one hand, self-disclosure is considered important for establishing trust in Web-based communication, as it signals a willingness to open up and, hence, might promote the reciprocal exchange of information [38]; accordingly, high number of self-references can lead to higher credibility judgments [45].…”

“…Linguistically, as self-references (eg, first-person pronouns) are related to the extent of a speaker’s self-disclosure, they might offer information about providers’ trustworthiness in 2 ways: on the one hand, self-disclosure is considered important for establishing trust in Web-based communication, as it signals a willingness to open up and, hence, might promote the reciprocal exchange of information [38]; accordingly, high number of self-references can lead to higher credibility judgments [45]. On the other hand, it seems crucial that people share just the right amount of personal information, as sharing too much personal information and using too many first-person pronouns can also be perceived as unprofessional [41]; accordingly, high number of self-references are also found to negatively influence the trustworthiness of information providers on the Web [40,46]. Overall, the evidence on how self-disclosure affects trust-related evaluations is sparse and conflicting.…”

A quantitative exploration of repeated advice-seeking on Reddit's r/relationships

“…Longer writing may similarly be a demonstration of greater interest from the comment author as it can be interpreted as the author choosing to spend more time crafting their message to the recipient (Walther, 2007). Length has also been found to be related to perceived expertise in a study of online medical advice (Toma & D'Angelo, 2014) and to trustworthiness, when paired with context-appropriate language, in online consumer reviews (Filieri, 2016).…”

Does a Positive Illusory Bias Mediate the Moderating Effect of Achievement Orientation on Response to Exclusion in Boys with ADHD?

“…In the context of this study, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text-analysis program that has been used in numerous studies to analyze words in a writing sample (Ahmadian, Azarshahi, & Paulhus, 2016;Rand, Kraft-Todd, & Gruber, 2015;Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010;Toma & D'Angelo, 2015). Words are categorized into dictionaries based on derived categories.…”