De impact van taal en gender in negatieve reviews : Een experimentele studie naar gepercipieerde geloofwaardigheid en consumentengedrag

Abstract The impact of language and gender in negative reviews: an experimental study on perceived credibility and consumer behaviour This paper explores the impact of language and gender on the perceptions of a negative online review and its writer. We set up an experiment with a 2 (language errors vs. no errors) x 2 (Standard Dutch vs. tussentaal, lit. ‘in-between-language’) x 2 (female vs. male reviewer) x 2 (female vs. male respondents) between-subjects design. 298 participants were asked to rate one scenario with a negative review on text credibility, usefulness, emotion, source intelligence, consumer intention and WOM-intention. The results show that both gender and language have a significant impact on the perceptions of the respondents. The perceived text credibility, intelligence of the reviewer, usefulness of the review and consumer intention are significantly lower when the negative review contains language errors and/or tussentaal features and when the reviewer is female. The Standard Dutch scenario without mistakes of the male reviewer generates the highest scores.