Experts vs. Peers: The Role of Situational Characteristics in Opinion Seeking on Electronic Networks of Practice

To help information seekers find reliable solutions to their problems, many electronic networks of practice (ENP) forums incorporate contextual cues that provide signals originating from both expert and lay forum users about the quality of solutions. While extant research has explored how these cue sources influence information filtering on ENP forums, results on their relative impact remain fragmented and often contradictory. In this study, we draw on situation theory to examine how six situational characteristics influence individuals’ propensity to rely on peer vs. expert recommendations. We asked participants to rate the characteristics of 20 situations and then report the extent to which they would rely on expert and peer recommendations. Based on 261 survey responses, we found that participants relied more on expert recommendations when seeking information for situations that they perceive as stressful, requiring greater cognitive processing, task-oriented, or threatening. They preferred peer recommendations for situations that they perceived as fun or mundane. These results demonstrate the importance of situational characteristics in decisions about advice seeking, partly explain conflicting findings in information search research, and offer community-building guidance for ENP platform owners as they manage their forums. However, these results also reveal a large variation in personal preferences, which requires additional inquiry.