Healer or Human? How Online Physician Reviews Guide Patient Choice

ABSTRACT

Online reviews increasingly guide physician choice, yet it remains unclear whether content emphasizing a physician's competence (technical skills) or benevolence (prioritizing patients' welfare over self‐interest) more strongly influences patients' decisions. Integrating a field study of 12,351 physician reviews with two online experiments, we distinguish two dimensions of review effectiveness: how helpful readers find a review, and how confident they feel about the choice it informs. We show that competence‐ and benevolence‐focused content influences these outcomes through distinct mechanisms. Benevolence‐focused reviews receive higher helpfulness evaluations because caring behaviors are easier to describe in concrete, vivid language and because naturalistic review platforms reward such vividness through cumulative votes. However, when concreteness and evaluation context are held constant, competence‐focused reviews are perceived as more diagnostic. Competence‐focused content generates greater choice confidence because it directly signals clinical risk, the consideration central to high‐stakes decisions. These effects emerge primarily in negative reviews, whereas positive reviews show no differences. Together, the studies reveal a systematic gap between reviews that are perceived as “helpful” and those that shape patients' decisions, informing how platforms design ranking and voting systems, how physicians communicate both competence and care, and how patients weigh competence‐relevant content even when it attracts fewer endorsements.