Interface Cues to Promote Disclosure and Build Community: An Experimental Test of Crowd and Connectivity Cues in an Online Sexual Health Forum

Health forums and support groupsdepend on participant self-disclosurefor their success, but the sensitive nature of personal health concerns raises privacy concerns that may constrain what users are willing to reveal. To address this issue, we explore the impact of visual cues designed to convey (1) two facets of social influence- crowdsize and social network connectivity-and (2) provide a frame designed to enhance the forum's senseof community. A 3 (Cue type: Crowd, Connectivity, None) x 2 (Framing) factorial experiment(N = 218) showed that cues implying greater crowdsize and connectivity lead to more self-disclosureof sensitive information, and higher intentions to revisit the community. Further, user belief in the community-buildingheuristic positively predicts self-disclosureand intentions, while also moderating the effect of the connectivity cue in a direction which implies that the cue encourages disclosure by triggering the community-buildingheuristic. Implications for the design of online groups are discussed.