Online information pools, such as user-generated encyclopedias and websites that aggregate users' ratings of various products and experiences, are increasingly popular venues where people seek out and share information. While cues about the identity of information sources may be limited in these venues, they may nonetheless incite a sense of shared group membership and social identity among users. This study applies Social Identity Theory and Self-Categorization Theory to examine the effects of group identification on people's information contribution and evaluation behaviors in online information pools. Experimental results indicate that shared group identification positively influences motivation, which in turn influences contribution to information pools. Additionally, people tend to find information contributed by similar others to be more credible and they are also more likely to indicate that they will act on this information. The implications of these findings on the sustenance of information pools, and for information sharing in the contemporary media environment more broadly, are discussed.
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Flanagin et al. (2013) studied this question.