Kimmerle Joachim, Bientzle Martina, Cress Ulrike
Knowledge Media Research Center (KMRC), Knowledge Construction Lab, Tübingen, Germany.
J Med Internet Res. 2014 Dec 4;16(12):e277. doi: 10.2196/jmir.3766.
On the Internet, people share personal experiences as well as facts and objective information. This also holds true for the exchange of health-related information in a variety of Internet forums. In online discussions about health topics, both fact-oriented and strongly personal contributions occur on a regular basis.
In this field experiment, we examined in what way the particular type of contribution (ie, factual information vs personal experiences) has an impact on the subsequent communication in health-related Internet forums.
For this purpose, we posted parallelized queries to 28 comparable Internet forums; queries were identical with regard to the information contained but included either fact-oriented descriptions or personal experiences related to measles vaccination. In the factual information condition, we posted queries to the forums that contained the neutral summary of a scientific article. In the personal experiences condition, we posted queries to the forums that contained the same information as in the first condition, but were framed as personal experiences
We found no evidence that personal experiences evoked more responses (mean 3.79, SD 3.91) from other members of the Internet forums than fact-oriented contributions (mean 2.14, SD 2.93, t26=0.126, P=.219). But personal experiences elicited emotional replies (mean 3.17, SD 1.29) from other users to a greater extent than fact-oriented contributions (mean 2.13, SD 1.29, t81=3.659, P<.001).
We suggest that personal experiences elicited more emotional replies due to the process of emotional anchoring of people's own style of communication. We recommend future studies should aim at testing the hypotheses with more general and with less emotionally charged topics, constructing different fact-oriented posts, and examining additional potential factors of influence such as personality factors or particular communication situations.
在互联网上，人们会分享个人经历以及事实和客观信息。在各种互联网论坛中，与健康相关的信息交流也是如此。在关于健康话题的在线讨论中，既有基于事实的内容，也经常会出现非常个人化的观点。
在这项现场实验中，我们研究了特定类型的观点（即事实性信息与个人经历）对健康相关互联网论坛后续交流产生影响的方式。
为此，我们向28个类似的互联网论坛发布了平行问题；这些问题包含的信息相同，但要么是基于事实的描述，要么是与麻疹疫苗接种相关的个人经历。在事实性信息组中，我们向论坛发布的问题包含一篇科学文章的中性摘要。在个人经历组中，我们向论坛发布的问题包含与第一组相同的信息，但表述为个人经历。
我们没有发现证据表明个人经历比基于事实的观点能从互联网论坛的其他成员那里引发更多回复（均值3.79；标准差3.91）（基于事实的观点均值2.14；标准差2.93；t(26)=0.126；P=0.219）。但是个人经历比基于事实性描述的观点更能在更大程度上引发其他用户的情绪化回复（均值3.17；标准差1.29）（基于事实的观点均值2.13；标准差1.29；t(81)=3.659；P<0.001）。
我们认为，由于人们自身交流风格的情感锚定过程，个人经历引发了更多情绪化回复。我们建议未来的研究应旨在使用更普遍且情感负荷较小的主题来检验这些假设，构建不同的基于事实的帖子，并研究其他潜在的影响因素，如个性因素或特定的交流情境。
