The Persuasiveness of Source Credibility: A Critical Review of Five Decades' Evidence
2004/02/01 by Chanthika Pornpitakpan · 2,180 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Advertising #Business #Computer science #Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification #Credibility #Data source #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Empirical evidence #Empirical research #Epistemology #Information retrieval #Law #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Persuasion #Persuasive communication #Political science #Promotion (chess) #Psychology #Social psychology #Source credibility #Statistics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2004.tb02547.x
published in Journal of Applied Social Psychology 34(2), 243-281 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2004/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Abstract
This paper reviews the empirical evidence of the effect of credibility of the message source on persuasion over a span of 5 decades, primarily to come up with recommendations for practitioners as to when to use a high‐ or a low‐credibility source and secondarily to identify areas for future research. The main effect studies of source credibility on persuasion seem to indicate the superiority of a high‐credibility source over a low‐credibility one. Interaction effect studies, however, show source credibility to be a liability under certain conditions. The variables found to interact with source credibility are categorized into 5 categories: source, message, channel, receiver, and destination variables. The most heavily researched variables have been the message and receiver variables. Implications for marketers/advertisers and suggestions for future research are discussed.
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