The perceived credibility of personal Web page information as influenced by the sex of the source

This field experiment examined the effects of the sex of Web site authors and Web site visitors on perceptions of the credibility of personal Web pages. Participants viewed male and female Web pages created for this study, patterned after personal pages on the Web, and assessed sponsor, message, and Web site credibility. Results revealed that men rated both message credibility and site credibility significantly higher than did women and that there was a significant interaction effect whereby opposite-sex credibility evaluations were higher than same-sex credibility evaluations. Overall, this study reveals that sex differences are meaningful in cyberspace but that the reduced cues environment challenges researchers to locate precisely what factors underlie these differences. Potential explanations include the vestiges of a sex-imbalanced Internet culture, sex similarity, sex and message congruence, and social desirability. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.