Research suggests that participants who read user comments after reading an online source's article showed a relative sleeper effect for user comments in a post-test, but not a sleeper effect for the source's credibility.

Sleeper Effects: Presentation of Source Followed by Comments

- Presentation of source followed by comments

Davidson College

Grounded on principles of primacy and recency, the differential decay hypothesis suggests that the persuasiveness of a message and a discounting cue have different rates of decay. Since the discounting cue appears after the message, it is is expected to decay faster.

Differential Decay Hypohtesis

Heinbach, D., Ziegele, M., & Quiring, O. (2018). Sleeper effect from below: Long-term effects of source credibility and user comments on the persuasiveness of news articles. New Media & Society, 20(12), 4765–4786. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818784472

Sleeper effect from below: Long-term effects of source credibility and user comments on the persuasiveness of news articles

Examples of the Differential Decay Hypothesis

- Opposite impact
- Sequence of source and discounting cue

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