Social Media Platforms and Sustainable Tourism Choices: The Role of Online Review Credibility and Cognitive Processing

This study examines how social media–driven information environments shape pro-environmental travel decision-making within the broader context of sustainable tourism and digital information expansion. It aims to explain how informational, cognitive, and evaluative mechanisms jointly influence behavioral intention by integrating perceived trustworthiness of user-generated content, ecological awareness, attitude formation, and cognitive processing bias within a moderated mediation framework. Data were collected from 315 respondents in Azerbaijan through a structured survey and analyzed using structural equation modeling to test both mediating and conditional relationships. The results show that perceived trustworthiness of user-generated content significantly strengthens attitude formation, which is the strongest predictor of behavioral intention. Trust also has a direct effect, but its influence mainly operates through evaluative pathways. Ecological awareness partially mediates the relationship between trust and intention, indicating multiple parallel mechanisms. Furthermore, cognitive processing bias weakens the effect of trust on attitude and reduces indirect effects. Overall, the findings suggest that sustainable tourism behavior is driven more by credibility-based cognitive evaluation than by mere information availability, highlighting the importance of credibility-enhancing and cognitively effective communication strategies.