Signaling expertise speeds consensus on medical info online
The Effect of Expertise Signaling when Sharing Medical Information in Opinion Dynamics
Social and Information NetworksComputers and Society
Summary
People’s health decisions are influenced by what they read on social media, but not all information is equally trusted. The authors found that when posts include a professional title, people trust the information more. They used this insight to create a model showing that having some users signal their expertise helps everyone agree faster on correct medical opinions. Even a small number of users displaying titles greatly speeds up consensus and moves opinions closer to experts’ views on different types of networks.
What this means in practice
- •For social media platform designers: Incorporate expertise titles in user profiles to boost trust and accelerate agreement on accurate health information.
- •For health communication teams: Encourage verified medical professionals to display their credentials to increase the reliability and reach of their online posts.
Authors
Moyi Li, Chuqiao Yan, Jesus Jair Reyes Gutierrez, Aleksandra Urman, Stefania Ionescu
Abstract
Social media heavily influences health decisions, yet few opinion dynamics models account for how information is delivered. This work investigates how signaling source expertise shapes trust and long-term opinion formation. Through an online experiment, we find that adding a professional title to the sender's display name significantly increases a post's perceived credibility. Incorporating these findings to create a data-driven opinion dynamics model, we prove that (1) connecting users through some paths to an expert guarantees consensus with experts' opinion, while (2) higher rates of expertise signaling accelerate reaching consensus. Simulations show that (3) convincing even 20% of users to signal their title reduces consensus time to nearly one-third in Erdos-Renyi networks and (4) higher title adoption brings average opinion much closer to that of experts in scale-free and real-world networks. Altogether, our work highlights expertise signaling as a viable intervention to promote validated medical information online.