Beyond credibility: expressive authenticity judgments of online reviews

Previous research defines and measures the authenticity of online reviews as credibility, a judgment of believability or accuracy based on the validity of the reviewer and the review. Outside of this literature, authenticity is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct that incorporates both objective and subjective judgments. This research seeks to bring the conceptualization and measurement of authenticity of online reviews more in line with the broader literature on authenticity. We argue that the authenticity of online reviews should also incorporate a subjective judgment of expressive authenticity, the extent to which the communication represents the true expression of the communicator’s values, beliefs, and experiences. Across nine studies, we find evidence that consumers judge the expressive authenticity of reviews distinct from credibility, and that credibility and expressive authenticity judgments have separate effects on review usefulness. We further identify a set of linguistic cues that are used by review readers in expressive authenticity judgments and by review writers in crafting expressively authentic reviews. We use these cues along with a self-report measure of consumer expressive authenticity judgments adapted from literature in other contexts to develop a natural language processing model that can predict these judgments based on linguistic analysis of the review text.