Investigating moderating roles of goals, reviewer similarity, and self-disclosure on the effect of argument quality of online consumer reviews on attitude formation

An online experiment (N = 357) examined how goals, reviewer similarity, and amount of self-disclosure interacted with review quality in the formation of an attitude about a product, and intended purchase of the product. Participants were given different goals (looking for experience attributes vs. search attributes) and shown reviews for a hotel before answering a questionnaire, to determine attitudes toward a target hotel. High quality reviews resulted in more favorable attitudes towards the hotel, which increased the purchase intention. A significant interaction emerged between reviewer similarity and review quality, suggesting that better quality reviews were expected from in-group members, than out-group members.