The vicarious and source credibility grid acrosscultures

Abstract

The manuscript offers an expansion of a traditional view of source credibility based on evaluation of a message source with inclusion of vicarious credibility (evaluation by members of a social network). The move reflects the need to consider differing cultural perspectives on how a message source might become evaluated. Data from 1,149 participants (US, Spanish, Japanese) identify vicarious and source credibility as significantly different. Classification results from discriminant analysis, where vicarious and source become a single function to create new grounds for cross-cultural communication research. The new paradigm requires the examination of both vicarious credibility in conjunction with source credibility that produce a credibility grid.