Seeing is Believing? Credibility and Behavioral Intentions Toward Evidence-Based and Misleading Health Information

Purpose To examine how adults respond to real-world health videos that vary in credibility. Design Randomized, within-subjects online experiment. Setting Online U.S. survey. Sample 179 adults recruited from an online panel. Intervention Participants viewed one misleading and one evidence-based health video, in randomized order. Measures Before viewing, participants reported trust in traditional and social media. After each video, they rated perceived information credibility (PIC) and perceived source credibility (PSC), relevance, and behavioral intention to adopt the recommended behavior. Demographic data were also collected. Analysis Paired-samples t -tests and hierarchical linear regressions examined responses to evidence-based vs misleading videos and associations among the variables. Results The evidence-based video was rated higher for relevance ( t (178) = −4.93, P < .001), PSC ( t (178) = −11.36, P < .001), PIC ( t (178) = −10.61, P < .001), and intention ( t (178) = 5.73, P < .001). For both videos, PSC and relevance were positively associated with intention. Trust in traditional media was related to higher PSC ( b = .43, P < .001) and PIC ( b = .35, P < .001) of the evidence-based content, whereas trust in social media was related to higher PSC ( b = .46, P < .001) and PIC ( b = .33, P = .022) of the misleading content. Higher education was associated with a better ability to distinguish between the PSC and PIC of the two videos ( p s < .01). Conclusions Findings highlight psychological and contextual factors shaping engagement with online health information and the importance of speaker credibility and platform trust in promoting informed health decision-making.