Visual Matters: Connecting Aesthetic Appeal and Production Quality of Photos, Infographics and Data Visualizations to Credibility of Social Media Posts
For social media researchers and practitioners, this study differentiates visual formats and identifies processing fluency as a mechanism for credibility, though findings are incremental and limited to one experiment.
This research examines how visual formats (photos, infographics, data visualizations) and features (aesthetic appeal, production quality) affect perceived credibility of social media posts, finding that visual posts are generally more credible than text-only posts, but this advantage holds only for photos and infographics, not data visualizations. Aesthetic appeal increases credibility partially mediated by processing fluency, while production quality has no significant effect.
The rapid proliferation of visual content raises fundamental questions about how different visual formats and features shape perceived credibility. Drawing on processing fluency theory, this research examines how visuals shape credibility judgments. We focus on three popular formats-photos, infographics, and data visualizations-comparing them to text-only posts, and test how two visual features, aesthetic appeal and production quality, influence credibility through processing fluency as a mediating mechanism. Through a preregistered experiment with 1200 US participants, we found that visual posts are generally perceived as more credible than text-only posts but this credibility advantage only applies to photos and infographics, not to data visualizations. Aesthetic appeal increases perceived credibility, partially mediated by processing fluency, while production quality had no significant effect on credibility across formats. These findings differentiate visual formats, advance conceptualizations of visual features, and identify processing fluency as a key mechanism for theorizing credibility across multimodal contexts.