Extending the Warmth-Competence Dichotomy: Matched Linguistic Styles of Human/Virtual Influencers Drive Social Media Sharing via Cognitive-Affective Pathways

Virtual influencers have emerged as experts in specific domains, attracting followers by creating content on platforms such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. However, their rise also challenges the traditional impact of human influencers on tourist well-being. As influencers increasingly adopt certain linguistic styles, a critical question remains underexplored: when and why might specific language features be effective? To address this gap, this study adopts cognitive and affective perspectives to examine how different linguistic characteristics of social media influencers (human vs. virtual) influence tourists’ sharing intentions. In Study 1, we investigated how the combination of influencer type (human vs. virtual) and language style (warmth- vs. competence-oriented) differentially affects willingness to share. In Study 2, we employed different scenarios and controlled for gender effects to test the robustness of our findings. In Study 3, we introduced the moderating role of temporal perception. The results reveal that the speaking style of influencers boosts tourists’ sharing intention through the mediation of processing fluency and psychological richness. Specifically, for human influencers, using a warm (as opposed to competent) language style leads to stronger willingness to share, as it triggers higher levels of processing fluency and psychological richness. In contrast, for virtual influencers, a competence-oriented (rather than warm) language style is more effective. Furthermore, we found that a lower level of temporal perception enhances the effect of influencer language style on sharing intention, whereas a higher level of temporal perception weakens this effect. By unraveling the matching mechanism between influencer type and language features, this study offers novel theoretical and practical insights for social media promotional strategies.