Where does information adoption collide?

Sussman and Siegal's 2003 account of how people take in and act on advice, framed as a knowledge-transfer process. It adapts the technology acceptance model and the dual-process persuasion literature: argument quality, a central route, and source credibility, a peripheral route, both raise the perceived usefulness of a message, and usefulness in turn drives whether the recipient adopts the information. They tested it on consultants judging emailed advice from colleagues and found that usefulness mediated the influence of both routes on adoption. This is the referent the rest of the map is measured against, the place where argument quality, information usefulness, and information adoption were first bolted together into one chain. The thing they call information adoption is close to what other literatures call knowledge transfer, advice taking, or use of a recommendation.[1]

Unit

A knowledge worker's uptake of a specific piece of advice

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Likert items on message usefulness and on intention to adopt the advice, fitted as a path model

The engine the information adoption model borrows. Petty and Cacioppo's elaboration likelihood model splits persuasion into two routes: a central route, where people are moved by the quality of the arguments, and a peripheral route, where they lean on cues such as the source's credibility. Information adoption imports that split wholesale, renaming the central route argument quality and the peripheral route source credibility. The difficulty is that argument quality is left largely undefined: in the original experiments a strong argument was simply whatever pretesting showed produced more favourable thoughts, so the construct is fixed by its effect rather than by any property of the argument itself. Zhao and colleagues, building a measure of perceived argument strength, found the concept slippery and only loosely specified, which means a load-bearing link in the adoption chain rests on a term that is hard to pin down. The fuller treatment sits at elaboration and need for cognition.[2][3]

Unit

The perceived strength of the arguments in a message

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Manipulated by strong-versus-weak argument pretests, or rated with perceived-argument-strength scales

The information adoption model's second life. Cheung, Lee, and Rabjohn carried Sussman and Siegal's chain into online consumer communities, where the advice is a stranger's review rather than a colleague's email, and reported that argument quality and source credibility again feed information usefulness, which feeds adoption of the opinion. Filieri and McLeay traced the same pattern for travellers reading accommodation reviews. In this literature one idea travels under several names at once: information usefulness, review helpfulness, review adoption, and the perceived value of eWOM are used almost interchangeably, and helpfulness is often just a platform's helpful-vote count standing in for the survey construct. This is the jangle sibling, a mechanism with a drawer full of labels, sitting next to the older word of mouth literature it grew out of.[4][5]

Unit

A reader's uptake of a specific online review or recommendation

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Survey items on usefulness and adoption, or helpful-vote counts used as a proxy